Top 5 Tools for Secure Delete that You Should Know

It is well-known how important the data recovery tools are, especially when you deal with sensitive information of yourself at home or of other users when working in professional environments.

But…

Is it safe to develop such efficient tools for data recovery?

Consider this:

You are working for a reputed bank and are responsible for managing servers and PCs that contain sensitive login details of the customers. All the information is stored in computers’ hard drive and it is your responsibility to maintain their security.

After some time, you decide to upgrade one of the PCs and get a bigger hard disk drive to accommodate more data that your bank gets due to the successful growth of the business. In order to use a bigger hard disk drive, you would definitely want to discard the one currently in use and before doing so, it is extremely important to erase all the sensitive data that it contains.

After you have successfully erased the sensitive information from the hard disk drive and trashed it, how secure do you think you data is even after the successful deletion? How can you be sure that any smart techie won’t gain access to the trashed hard drive, run any efficient data recovery tool such as Wondershare Data Recovery on it to recover the erased sensitive information, and exploit the data for individual benefit?

Considering the above aspect, sometimes the efficient data recovery tools can be harmful, as long as you don’t have another efficient tool to erase data from the storage securely. That being said, sometimes the files must be removed permanently so that they cannot be recovered even by using an efficient data recovery tool whatsoever.

Recovering the Deleted Data, Deleting It Securely, and Overwriting

If you don’t want your sensitive data to be recovered at all after deletion, you must make some smart moves to ensure your data becomes unusable and unrecoverable by any means. Your best bet to get this done would be:

1. Use an efficient secure data deletion tool to delete and destroy the data securely.

2. Write and re-writing another random data multiple times on the storage to make the sensitive data completely unrecoverable and unusable forever. Most of the times the data deletion tools do this right after wiping the storage. In fact, it is because of this final step that your data becomes unrecoverable.

Top 5 Tools for Secure Delete & Data Shredders

As discussed above, erasing data securely from your storage is extremely important, especially when you are dealing with sensitive information.

Below are the best 5 data erasing tools that not only delete data from your hard drive or any other re-writable storage but also make the erased information unrecoverable:

Part 1Secure Delete: Darik’s Boot And Nuke (Rating 4.5/5)

This is one of the best and most appreciated data shredding tool worldwide. Its ready-to-use .ISO file can be downloaded easily and all you need to do after that is, burn the .ISO file to a blank optical media (CD or DVD), boot the PC with the media and permanently erase the sensitive data from your storage.

Methods that DBAN uses for data sanitization are: DoD, RCMP TSSIT OPS-II, 5220-22M, Gutman, Write Zero, and Random Data.

Part 2Secure Delete: HDShredder Free Edition (Rating 4.5/5)

HDShredder has two variants that allow you to use the tool both from within Windows and externally. You can use the former variant when you want to permanently wipe the data from any storage other than the system drive (where Windows is installed), whereas the latter variant must be used to wipe the drive that has Windows in it. The paid version of this program offers even more promising features.

Methods that HDShredder Free Edition uses for data sanitization are: Write Zero (for up to 7 times overwrite).

Part 3Secure Delete: HDDErase (Rating 3.5/5)

HDDErase requires a bootable media (USB/CD/DVD) to boot your PC externally and thus it allows you to wipe your entire hard disk drive even if it has the operating system installed in it. Since the PC is booted externally using the HDDErase program, no Windows files are in use. This allows HDDErase to wipe all the files permanently off the storage.

Methods that HDDErase uses for data sanitization are: Secure Erase.

Part 4Secure Delete: PCDiskEraser (Rating 3/5)

Yet another data shredding tool that requires a bootable media to run, thus giving the program full and unrestricted access on your hard drive including the system partition (C:). With such kind of privilege, PCDiskEraser can completely wipe your hard disk and can permanently delete your data off from it.

Methods that PCDiskEraser uses for data sanitization are: DoD and 5220 22-M.

Part 5Secure Delete: KillDisk (Rating 3/5)

KillDisk is a multiplatform program that comes in two variants – installer and bootable. The tool can be installed on Windows or Linux operating systems to wipe the data off from the external hard disk drives or other storage media. With the bootable variant, the program is capable of shredding the data off even from the system disk where the primary operating system is installed.

Methods that KillDisk uses for data sanitization are: Write Zero.

Many efficient data shredding tools are free and some of them are listed above. If you wish to use any data shredder in a production environment, always keep your program up-to-date with latest patches and updates to get the most out of the tool.

If you lost data on your computer unfortunately, don't worry! You still have the chance to get lost data back. To recovery files from computer, you can have a try the following tool.