Computers are great time savers (at least sometimes) but there are times when they take short cuts to keep themselves running quickly and efficiently – Secure Delete can overcome one of the scariest shortcuts.
One of these shortcuts comes when you delete a file.
You likely already know that deleted files get sent to your recycle bin and can be undeleted from there with just a mouse click.
But what happens after they leave your recycle bin is a bit scarier if you’ve got confidential information that you’d rather keep secret.
Why use Secure Delete?
When Windows “deletes” a file it really only puts a marker in its file allocation system to say that the space on your hard drive can be re-used.
So anyone with a bit of computer savvy – or a file undelete program such as File Saver – can retrieve the file with little or no hassle.
Not good if your hard drive has confidential information about yourself, such as your passwords and credit card numbers, or about the company you work for.
Which means that you need to think about how to securely delete any files that you’d rather stayed permanently deleted. Especially before you give away your out of date machine to someone else or even just loan it to somone while their machine is being fixed.
The best way to really, really, really delete a file is to overwrite the space it occupied lots of times. Which is boring and difficult to do on your own.
It’s much better to use a computer program specially designed to do the task.
Secure Delete does exactly that.
All you need to do is drag and drop the files that you never want to anyone to see again to the program.
Then press the “delete” button.
The space occupied by the file is overwritten 42 times. Which is double the US Government’s recommendation for deleting their confidential official documents.
It takes a second or two for the program to delete a file forever, never to be recovered. Or you can delete complete folders with a right mouse click from My Computer, Windows Explorer, etc.
Verdict
Secure Delete works simply and efficiently.
It performs its intended task of securely deleting files exactly as intended.
If you ever need to banish files from your hard disk forever this is a simple, inexpensive solution.