Secure File Deletion: How You Can Permanently Delete Files

OK, you’ve highlighted a file and pressed “delete”. So that’s it. It’s gone forever, isn’t it?

Well actually, no It’s still on your hard drive.

The problem with computers is that they take short cuts. And one of the things they take a short cut on is that they don’t actually delete a file when you click delete. At times, this can be useful because it means you can undelete a file that you’ve accidentally deleted.

But what can you do if you want to completely obliterate all traces of a file? Maybe you’re selling your computer and you don’t want the new owner to have access to all your passwords. Maybe you had some confidential documents from your company and you need to make sure that they’re not kept on your hard disk any longer than needed. Maybe it’s some email correspondence you don’t want anyone else to get hold of.

No matter the reason, just hitting the delete button isn’t good enough.

Unless you are 100% certain that your computer will only ever be used by you and you alone, you’ve got to ensure that any files that need to be deleted forever really are deleted permanently.

This means that you’re going to need some help from a software program. The only other way is to format your hard disk tens of times and then splinter it into thousands of little pieces, there’s no way you can do this on your own.

Fortunately you can download some affordable software that will give you the same kind of file security the government would expect to use.

It will overwrite the space occupied by the file you want to delete. Not just once or twice (that’s still too easy to recover) but lots and lots of times. Once it’s done it’s job, not even the NSA’s high powered computers would be able to read the contents of the file.

Which means if you want to be completely certain that your files are permanently deleted, you should download this inexpensive software!

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