File Shredder?

fenlander_uk

This thread's been going for more than 2 weeks now. Have you tried any of the software that's been suggested? Shredders are small utilities that can be downloaded, installed, tried and if necessary removed in a matter of minutes.

joe2cool

Hi had used eraser for quite a while with Vista on desk top, so now glad it will work with Win 7 on the laptop...........thx again

Jemma-T

CCleaner

People tend to recommend it for cleaning your browser cache and general registry problems but it also has an easy to use shredder from the Tools button called Drive Wiper. Excellent for local drives, flash USB etc etc. From the options choose the pass level ("Security") (ie how many times you want the data over-written) and either free space (doesn't touch other data) or entire drive.

http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/

Lum

Note that if you have an SSD then file shredders are no-longer needed and will cause slightly more wear and tear on your expensive SSD. Instead you should just delete files normally and let TRIM take care of it for you.

If you are unsure whether your system has an SSD or not... you almost certainly don't have one

joe2cool

Lum wrote: »

Note that if you have an SSD then file shredders are no-longer needed and will cause slightly more wear and tear on your expensive SSD. Instead you should just delete files normally and let TRIM take care of it for you.

If you are unsure whether your system has an SSD or not... you almost certainly don't have one

OK Thx didn't know that

Lum

A more detailed explanation. SSDs are very fast at read/write, but a lot slower to erase, and it is necessary to erase a block before you can write new data to it. On the early SSDs this caused a major performance hit once the drive became full.

You're (presumably) already aware that when you delete a file on a hard drive the file isn't actually deleted, just the pointer to that file. The original file can be easily found with special tools until such time as another file happens to get written to that location. In the case of an SSD, when this happens you get the performance hit of needing to do erase/write instead of just write.

TRIM is a mechanism where modern SSDs and modern OSes (Win7+8, recent versions of OSx and recent versions of Linux) tell the SSD "hey, I don't need the data there any more" and then when the SSD has a spare minute where it's not doing something more important, that block will be erased quietly in the background so that next time it needs to write there, the write is nice and fast.

Since each erase/write cycle causes wear to that block on the SSD, the traditional file shredder approach of writing crap over where the file used to be just creates additional wear and doesn't make you any more secure as the block is getting erased anyway.

If you are using a mechanical hard drive, then TRIM does not happen, even on a modern OS, so you should continue to use your file shredder if you are that concerned about someone snooping through your sensitive documents.

Note: If you are using an SSD on an older OS that doesn't support TRIM, such as Vista or XP, you still shouldn't be using a file shredder. The manufacturer of your SSD will provide a tool you can run that will scan your filesystem and TRIM those empty blocks. You can run that once a week, similar to how you might run a defrag on a traditional hard drive, or you can run it after you delete one of your sensitive documents. Just writing over the file a second time, like an erased does, won't delete the file even on XP. SSDs perform "wear levelling" so that second write will most likely happen somewhere else on the SSD anyway.


If you don't have an SSD, sorry for derailing your thread

joe2cool

Cheers.................................................