Transcript
Step 4: Securely Delete Files Did you know that when you simply delete a file, it doesn’t really get erased from your computer? Even if you empty your Recycle Bin or use Shift+Delete to delete a file. That’s because of the way Windows works. You see, when you give Windows a command to delete a file, all it does is deletes its index and its name. The file itself is still there, waiting to be overwritten by new data. It’s a bit like in a library even if a book’s card is lost and its name is deleted from the index, the book is still there and anyone could find and take it if they looked hard enough. Sometimes Windows overwrites files in a matter of hours, but sometimes it can take months for Windows to overwrite a deleted file. Until the file is completely overwritten, anybody could recover it using free file recovery software. The common way of deleting files is not all that great because it’s not at all secure. So, whenever you delete files that contain your private information, you should do something better than hitting the Delete key. What you need to do is shred these files with a file shredder. A file shredder is a software program that does exactly the same thing as a paper shredder - tears up your files beyond recovery. It achieves this by overwriting the original file with random data several times in a row, so that the original data is completely gone. Generally speaking, there are two types of data shredding software - file shredders that shred individual files and disk wipers that overwrite all already deleted files (i.e. wipe free disk space clean). Ideally, you should use both of them. A file shredder is good to delete a file or two, and a disk wiper will save you a lot of time and trouble if you want to sell or give away your old computer without having to reformat it. There are many software tools that combine a file shredder and a disk wiper, so finding a good program won’t be hard.
