#File shredder best windows software
#File shredder best windows plus

However, a recent article I read said that in a particular data recovery lab (where labs, researchers, time, and money are not an object) were able to recover a small portion of data from a piece of a smashed drive platter the size of a pea. Just Google for a 'drive eraser' or 'drive wiper') then destroy it with a hammer. Yes, SSD's and even USB flash drives can be wiped.Īnyway, I hope that helps answer what you were asking about.ĮDIT: If you intend to discard an old drive on which bank, credit card, taxes, or any other data you wouldn't want someone to dig out of the trash and run a data recovery program on, it's best to do a whole drive wipe (note that the programs that will wipe an entire drive are sometimes different than the ones used to wipe files.

#File shredder best windows plus

Plus that many passes can be extremely time consuming depending on what you're wiping.

#File shredder best windows software

Note that the Department of Defense says 3 passes is enough to wipe sensitive goverment data. Let’s take a look at some free secure eraser or shredder software for Windows 11/10/8/7: We have already looked at some free File Shredder software Free File Wiper, SDelete, Cipher, Microsoft. So as you can see, the 35 passes you mentioned are way, way, way overkill for a home user just wanting to make a file or files unrecoverable. It consists of 3 passes of 0's, 1's, then random data then verifies that all 3 passes were indeed written. However, what the name of the scheme is doesn't matter much, they basically determine the number of passes and what the passes consist of as they're overwriting the file or files you want gone.īy what they 'consist of' I mean that they overwrite with 0's, 1's, or random data.ġ) The 'Peter Gutmann' method (aka just 'Gutmann') consists of 35 passes with random data.Ģ) The VSITR wipe pattern method consists of 7 passes with alternating 0's and 1's then randoms characters for the last pass.ģ) The DoD 5220.22-M Wipe Method was developed by the US Government and the Department of Defense.

Those tools, often referred to as 'file recovery' software, are taking advantage of shortcomings of. There are quite a few software tools today for the retrieval of deleted files under Windows OS. Each scheme was put together by individuals, companies, governments, etc. With File Shredder you can remove files from your hard drive without fear they could be recovered.

If you've read up much since you posted here, you know by now that there are data destruction 'schemes'.

File Shredder is pretty good but I prefer Eraser because it has plenty of features to select when, where, and what you want shredded/wiped.