http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/
I saw this on TechTV the other day and think it is something you all should be using. The best part is that it is FREE. As you may have heard, one of the undercover news shows recently bought 200 used computers from places like Ebay, and on 197 of them they were able to recover personal information like credit card numbers, SSNs, birthdates etc that the owners had deleted and THOUGHT was gone forever. Their point was that when you erase information on your computer, it is not really gone. It is still on your hard drive where anyone with a modicum of computer knowledge could retrieve it.
This program not only erases files, it goes one step further. It then writes over the hard drive sectors with 1's and 0's a set number of times. Doing this not only erases the data, it eliminates any chance of it being recovered. You can choose 1 time, 3, 7 (Dept of Defense standard) or 35. Once installed, you can right click on a file and choose Erase, rather than deleteing it and sending it to the Recycle Bin. Or if you still want to use the Recycle Bin, it allows you to right click on the Bin and choose Erase, where it will overwrite all of the files you wanted to delete.
The program also allows you to run a procedure (probably will take overnight) which goes through and writes over all of the empty space on your hard drive where you have previously deleted data. For those of you worried about having personal data recovered or even if you are just looking to clean up a computer before donating it to charity, you should really look into this.
I saw this on TechTV the other day and think it is something you all should be using. The best part is that it is FREE. As you may have heard, one of the undercover news shows recently bought 200 used computers from places like Ebay, and on 197 of them they were able to recover personal information like credit card numbers, SSNs, birthdates etc that the owners had deleted and THOUGHT was gone forever. Their point was that when you erase information on your computer, it is not really gone. It is still on your hard drive where anyone with a modicum of computer knowledge could retrieve it.
This program not only erases files, it goes one step further. It then writes over the hard drive sectors with 1's and 0's a set number of times. Doing this not only erases the data, it eliminates any chance of it being recovered. You can choose 1 time, 3, 7 (Dept of Defense standard) or 35. Once installed, you can right click on a file and choose Erase, rather than deleteing it and sending it to the Recycle Bin. Or if you still want to use the Recycle Bin, it allows you to right click on the Bin and choose Erase, where it will overwrite all of the files you wanted to delete.
The program also allows you to run a procedure (probably will take overnight) which goes through and writes over all of the empty space on your hard drive where you have previously deleted data. For those of you worried about having personal data recovered or even if you are just looking to clean up a computer before donating it to charity, you should really look into this.
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