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How to Permanently Delete Files from your Hard Drive
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When you consider how many people from around the world use personal computers each and every day, it is surprising just how little we understand about how they work and how they manage files. Most of us believe that when we delete a file by placing it in the recycle bin, and then emptying the recycle bin, that the file in question is gone. In reality, the file isn’t gone and may not ever be gone unless you employ the help of software pioneered by the government. Let’s take a look at just what happens when you try to delete a file and how to permanently delete files from your hard drive.
It is a task we all do numerous times each day: we find a file we don’t want anymore and we send it off to Microsoft’s recycle bin for deletion. At some point during the day, we remember that the recycle bin is full and we empty it, never bothering to think that the file in question is still sitting right there. In reality, when we delete a file from our hard drives, what we are doing is deleting the file path so that we can’t find the file. In most cases, the file is moved to a hidden folder on our computer and, over time, the file is overwritten by more “deleted” files that are dumped on top of it. According to experts, no file is ever completely and totally deleted from your hard drive, unless you’ve taken it outside and destroyed it. The government and law enforcement organizations have software known as computer forensic software that can find and undelete almost any file that has been on any hard drive at any time. If you are wondering how to permanently delete files from your hard drive, there is one method you can employ that is not only free but essentially foolproof.
Learning how to permanently delete files from your hard drive requires you to use software similar to what law enforcement agencies use to recover data. Programs like Evidence Eliminator or BCWipe will write over a particular file as many times as you like (35 is considered the standard to utterly shred a file). Most government organizations use programs like this to delete sensitive documents, files, pictures and other content from their systems, although it is important to note that even with these programs, there is no guarantee that the files you’ve erased can’t be recovered.
Many of these erasing programs will have several different options that you can use to overwrite files depending on how careful you want to be. Even overwriting a file once or twice, which is obviously a much quicker process, is better than just deleting a file. If you have chosen to overwrite a video file that is several hundred megabytes in size, the process is going to take a while, even for the newest and fastest processors. You can also use these programs to overwrite all of the free space on your computer so that any previous file deletions will be overwritten, as well. Learning how to permanently delete files from your hard drive isn’t difficult once you employ the help of third party software.
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