May 23, 2013

File Shredder: Remove files permanently

One way to shred a file on your hard drive is to take its printout and then feed it through the physical shredder that you can usually find near your Office printer ;)

Jokes apart, “File Shredder” is a tool that can be used for shredding (destroying) unwanted files beyond recovery. Provided below are couple of paragraphs from the tool’s documentation to provide a quick overview. Go to the website for complete details and to download the tool.

Why is this tool required? There are quite a few software tools today for retrieval of deleted files under Windows OS. Those tools, often referred to as "file recovery" software, are taking advantage of shortcoming of Windows "delete" command that we all use regularly to delete files. Actually, the "delete" operation in Windows only removes bits of information from files so they appear deleted in OS. It is easy to retrieve those files using aforementioned specialized file recovery software.

In order to remove, or shred files permanently from your system, you have to use a program that is capable of rewriting the files with random series of binary data multiple times. This process is often called shredding. That way, the actual content of the file has been overwritten and the possibilities to recover such a shredded file are mostly theoretical.

http://www.fileshredder.org/