#Best file shredder for windows software
#Best file shredder for windows plus
#Best file shredder for windows free

Included translations: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Swedish, Arabic, Greek, Russian, Japanese, Czech, Hungarian, Turkish, Polish, Portuguese. This is necessary to make sure, that all existing file fragments are overwritten. File Shredder is an advanced security tool for Windows which allows you to completely remove sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several.

#Best file shredder for windows free

This is realized by writing data into the whole free disk space and delete it afterwards. Here the program offers the possibility to shred the free disk space of a drive. Maybe you already deleted some files, which you better like to be shred.

#Best file shredder for windows software

The result of this is, that recovery software may restore the file with its size, but the content is changed - so the file gets useless. This is realized in that way, that before the file is deleted, its content will be overwritten with a random content or zero-values several times. Alternate File Shredder allows you to delete files and/or folders finally, which means they cannot be restored by recovery software. The program also can overwrite the free space on a drive, which means, that already deleted files cannot be restored, too. 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.Alternate File Shredder is an application that allows you to finally delete files and/or folders (no recovery possible). 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.

#Best file shredder for windows plus

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

Note that the Department of Defense says 3 passes is enough to wipe sensitive goverment data. 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. Each scheme was put together by individuals, companies, governments, etc.

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.