In case you want to sell your PC or want to give it to someone for general use or want to charity it- the first thing you need to do is to securely wipe stored data on hard disk. Note here, I said ‘wipe disk data’. Disk wipe become an essential task if the PC is being used for business purposes which, apprently contains important data like account sheet, industrial secret, financial information and client details etc. Formatting drives, erasing data from right-click option or selecting data, press Shift+Delete is not just enough.
Data recovery from disk drives
Data recovery specialists can recover data from damaged disk drives such as Hard disk, floppy, CDs, DVDs and pan drives etc. Hence, data recovery is good in case data is lost or mistakely deleted. But it is risky in a way when you don’t want anybody be able to recover it later.
Disk wipe software
To put in simple words, disk wipe software work by deleting data and rewriting on memory so that data recovery become impossible for others.
List of Disk Wipe Freeware (For Windows)
DBAN (Darik’s Boot and Nuke): This disk wipe freeware is good choice in case of need to destroy all the data of all the connected hard disks and all the partition of all the hard disks. This is portable disk wipe freeware. It can be used in either CD, DVD or Floppy.
Note: This software will delete all the data. To wipe selected data you should go for next listed freeware.
Secure Delete: This freeware is useful when selected files or folders or sub- folders are needed to be wipe. Selected files will be deleted and empty memory bytes will be filled (rewrited) with useless data.
Free File Shredder: There are three ways this freeware can wipe data. Namely fast, forced and ultimate destruction.
Fast Data Destruction
: In this method empty memory o deleted files will be filled for once.
Forced Data Destruction
: This method will fill empty memory location three times as per mentioned in US Department of Defense standards (abbreviation of DoD)
Ultimate destruction
: this is most secure yet time consuming process. Total rounds re-filling data is 35 according to Guttman algorithm).
SDelete: SDelete is from Microsoft software (or may be recommended by Mocrosoft). This freeware is not Graphic User Interface Program, it command line program. That means one need to give command in order to make it work.
This disk wipe works according to USA Department of Defense clearing standard 5220.22-M. You can also mention the number of rounds to be perform to re-fill the empty memory.
compatible with Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000. It can also wipe data which are compressed, encrypted and sparse in Windows NT/2K
Disk Wipe Freeware For Linux
- Wipe Secure File Deletion