Most people have some data that they would rather not share with others – passwords, personal information, classified documents from work, financial records etc.
Perhaps you have saved some of this information on your computer where it is conveniently at your reach, but when the time comes to remove the data from your hard disk, things get a bit more complicated and maintaining your privacy is not as simple as it may have seemed at first.
Your first thought may be that when you ‘delete’ the file, the data is gone. Not quite, when you delete a file, the operating system does not really remove the file from the disk; it only removes the reference of the file from the file system table. The file remains on the disk until another file is created over it, and even after that, it might be possible to recover data by studying the magnetic fields on the disk platter surface. Before the file is overwritten, anyone can easily retrieve it with a disk maintenance or an undelete utility.
Eraser is an advanced security tool (for Windows), which allows you to completely remove sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns. It is kind of like a digital equivalent of your office shredder. Eraser is Free software and its source code is released under GNU General Public License.
To erase, just right click on the file or folder you want to erase and click on the ‘erase’ option on the menu. The same applies for erasing the contents of your recycle bin. You can ever erase unused disk space, that is disk space from which files have only previously been deleted. To do that, just right click on the drive and choose ‘Erase Unused Space’.
Hopefully, Eraser can also erase your worries about someone spying into your deleted files.
You May Also Be Interested In...
- How to safely remove an external USB drive
- Does your disk space usage seem to be showing wrong? System Restore could be the reason.
- Get rid of the false ‘Disk Full’ message on your thumb drive
- Disable Windows Indexing Service to improve performance
- How to display File Attributes in Tooltips
- How to install or remove a font in Windows XP
- Thumbs.db – What’s it and how to get rid of it.
- Turn Off System Restore to Save Space
Subscribe Now
If you enjoyed this post, you will definitely enjoy our others. Subscribe to the feed to get future posts delivered right to your mailbox or feedreader.





{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Been using Eraser for years and absolutely love it. Good to see the word is getting around!
ok