If you have more than one person accessing the same computer, whether at home or at work, just dragging files to trash and then deleting the contents, doesn't remove them from your system. Worse, there are many scenarios where people donate old PCs to a charity shop or dispose of an old hard drive, but simply wipe the drive, forgetting that any unformatting tool will retrieve most, if not all, the contents. You really need to erase the contents, but in a manner that stops a standard tool from reversing this process.

Eraser 5.85 is a free tool that you can use to wipe individual files, data and other important information from your drive. These tools work by deleting the contents in the normal manner and then wiping over the files with other miscellaneous content, so if someone does attempt to retrieve the content, they'll find worthless information.

31 Oct 2007