Eraser – Secure file deletion

Often when you work, you end up having documents that aren’t meant to be read by others. And when you then are done with those documents and you’ve secured your encrypted backup, then it’s time to remove the actual document and with secure file deletion make sure that the data can not be read from the disk. This is where ERASER comes in hand. With several different erasing methods:

1. Gutmann – with 35 passes.
2. US DoD 5220.22-M (8-306. /E, C and E) – with 7 passes.
3. US DoD 5220.22-M (8.306. / E) – with 3 passes.
4. Pseudorandom Data – with 1 pass.
5. Only first and last 2KB – with 1 pass.
6. Schneier’s 7 pass – with 7 passes.

It supports single file deletion, secure wipe of your recycle bin and you can even setup scheduled tasks to for instance, clear your free disk space to remove any traces of any documents there. And did I mention – it’s free!

Product description from the developers:

Most people have some data that they would rather not share with others – passwords, personal information, classified documents from work, financial records, self-written poems, the list can be continued forever.

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.

There are several problems in secure file removal, mostly caused by the use of write cache, construction of the hard disk and the use of data encoding. These problems have been taken into consideration when Eraser was designed, and because of this intuitive design and a simple user interface, you can safely and easily erase private data from your hard drive.

• Download it at http://eraser.heidi.ie/