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.

Download Eraser

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