How to Shred Files In Your Hard Drive for Free?
ADVERTISEMENTSShredding is a process of completely removing data from your hard drive. Remember - even if you delete files from your hard disk, the data still remains in the hard disk and could potentially be recovered.
If you’re going to sell your computer’s hard drive, you probably need to shred the files present there because you might have stored sensitive information on there earlier and wouldn’t want anyone to get access to it.
Eraser is a wonderful free files shredder that could do the job of shredding files on your hard drive. You can download it from this page. Here’s a quick how to on how you can use Eraser to shred files in your hard drive easily:
- Launch Eraser by clicking on the icon on your desktop
- In the Eraser window menu bar, choose File > New Task
- To perform file shredding on the free space of your hard drive, leave the first option selected and choose the drive where the shredding should happen
- To shred specific folders, select the second option and choose the folders whose files need to be shredded. If you want the files in the selected folder’s subfolders to be shredded too, check the Subfolders option
- To shred a particular file, select the third option and browse through to select the file that should be shredded
- Click OK
- You should see a new task listed in the Eraser window
- Now select the task and click the Run icon from the Eraser toolbar. Otherwise, press Ctrl+R
- The selected shredding operation will now happen
- Alternatively, you can shred files/folders from within Windows Explorer itself by right clicking and choosing Erase.
Hope you found this how to on shredding files on your hard drive helpful. If you’ve got any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments.
May 29th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
Thiz is nice tool
May 30th, 2008 at 1:57 am
For selling a hard drive, I personally would just reformat the drive to a different file system.
May 30th, 2008 at 5:15 am
I have yet to ever need to do this, but if I ever do, I will certainly remember this post! Thanks
May 30th, 2008 at 8:31 am
@Siddharth Thanks for dropping by.
@Jake That’s a good tip!
@Aseem You’re welcome.
May 31st, 2008 at 12:07 am
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June 1st, 2008 at 12:56 am
looks like a good tool…any idea on what does it do while deleting a file so that it should not be recoverable at all.
some thing like overwriting those sectors with some junk values?
June 1st, 2008 at 8:27 pm
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June 2nd, 2008 at 1:02 am
[...] If you are planning to sell or give away your Hard Disk, then do read this post by Shankar which tells you how to shred files in your Hard Drive [...]
June 2nd, 2008 at 2:07 am
Hey, this is ace!! Much better than buying a product to do it
Elliot
Btw, like the redesign - think its good!
June 2nd, 2008 at 10:14 am
@Abhishek: Yep, I think it overwrites over previously written data. The methods are described in the Help file of the program.
@Elliot: Thanks Elliot, a major redesign is underway
June 2nd, 2008 at 3:17 pm
Can anybody tell me how to recover the deleted data from hard drive, Please dont tell me any tools , just tell me how to do this, I have knoweledge in C, Assembly language and little bit of VB
Can i program to recover deleted data from Hard drive
June 14th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
Bikash
to recover deleted files, google search for a program called Recuva
this will recover your deleted files