How to Permanently Erase Deleted Files

If you have confidential or private data on your computer, such as personal pictures, financial documents and other sensitive pieces of information, you may be worried that someone could recover your deleted files. If you are selling or disposing of a computer or hard drive, you should be very careful.
In my previous blog I discussed about how you can recover deleted files, but there are some free utility software that can securely delete files or wipe off all data from your hard drive – by writing other data over the free space on your hard drive, and that will make deleted files permanently erased.

If you are planning on securely erasing a single or couple of files, you can use a “file-shredding” application such as FILE SHREDDER to erase them. In this tutorial, I will be using the File Shredder to do this.
Watch how to erase files from your hard drive with FILE SHREDDER

When a file is shredded or erased, not only is it deleted, but its data is overwritten entirely, preventing other people from recovering it. Note that this process takes longer than deleting a file normally, so it’s a bad idea to delete every file this way except for confidential ones.

When getting rid of your computer or hard drive, it’s important that you ensure all your personal data is erased. To really prevent someone from recovering any of your data, you can use a disk-wiping program, such as DBAN (Darik’s Boot and Nuke.), this software will erase everything from your hard drive, including your operating system and all your personal files, overwriting them with useless data.

You should now understand why deleted files can be recovered and when they can’t. Remember this when getting rid of a computer or hard drive – your confidential files may still be present on your hard drive if you haven’t properly erased them.
Here’s the procedure of erasing file(s) with File Shredder