Windows provides a nifty feature to easily and quickly delete any files, but is it, really? A while back I posted on how you can recover your deleted files, a few days back I gave you a list of 10 applications that lets you recover deleted files, which means deleted files aren’t really gone for good after all. Sometimes you might want to delete sensitive personal documents or any other file and your files aren’t really gone for good just with a shift+delete.
Usually, deleting a file only partially deletes certain data from a file which makes the file ‘apparently’ deleted, the above posts share applications that make use of this method of deleting files to recover them easily.
There are applications developed to workaround this life saver if you accidentally delete an important file flaw in deletion though, these applications are typically known as ‘shredders’ and software indexes are flooded with them. Shredders replace the actual data with random binary data and thus they cannot be recovered.
File Shredder (windows) is a free application that ‘shreds’ your files, while it couldn’t get more boring with such a matter of fact file name it does quite a good job at ‘scrambling’ your file and then deleting it with little hope of being recovered, using standard file recovery software at least. Another great free alternative you might want to check out is AbsoluteShield File Shredder.
While I was referring to Windows in the above example, this recoverability exists in other operating systems as well, for Mac there is ShredIt X which is a similar app for mac however it is shareware. For linux you can refer to this tutorial on linux.com on how to shred files.
There are other methods and applications to shred files, if you are aware of any alternatives you use, feel free to share them in the comments.
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I’ve just deleted a file without actually saving it, I can’t seem to use the shredder properly. I do need some help on this..Really urgent Luqmaan.
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do you want to retrieve it or shred (permanently delete) it? By the looks of the comment you want to retrieve it back to save it? thanks for the comment.
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[...] How to Permanently Delete a File (computer-realm.net) [...]
thanks for tips… that’s so helpfull..
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