How To: Delete Files Securely

Going to sell your hard drive? Deleting personal files from a memory stick? Don’t believe it when Windows says that with one click, the file is deleted. In the real world, it takes a lot more to actually delete a file.

This sounds a little strange, but when deleting a file, it isn’t actually deleted. This means that when you delete a file, your system hides it and tells itself that the file can be overwritten. The data still stays on the hard drive. But now the computer knows that new files can overwrite the “deleted” file and it will get overwritten, eventually. The more files you save on the same drive as the “deleted” file, the likelier it is that it will get overwritten. And only when a file is totally overwritten, it is deleted.

Anyone with a simple program can recover these files very easily. Just think about it: You sell your old computer and the new owner has access to all your “deleted” images and documents… Not very nice, eh? You think you’ve deleted everything but in fact you haven’t.

Just like for recovering files, there are programs for permanently deleting files. Inferno is one of the best for them. Download it right now. If for some weird reason you don’t like Inferno, go to Google and type secure delete. Most of them fuction the same way.

Lets spend a minute or two configuring Inferno the way we want it to work. The most important thing is to decide how secure is secure enough. Secure deletion software will overwrite a file with a random series of digits. This way the “deleted” file isn’t hidden to lurk somewhere on your drive, but IS actually overwritten. The question is just how many times you want it overwritten. One time is good, 3 is even better, but why not 35 times? Click Settings and choose how many times you want your files overwritten. Inferno lets you choose between 1,3,7 and 35. With the last two, it’s more than likely that the world’s largest intelligence organizations can’t even recover the data… This means you can be quite sure whoever buys your computer and has CIA’s technology can’t read anything from your hard drive.

Some people don’t want others to know where they’ve been surfing. If you click on Internet History in Inferno’s settings you can tell it where your browser keeps its history and later also delete that securely.

Now, all you need to do is find the files you want to delete and drag them into Inferno’s window. The buttons at the top of the window can also help you to locate files. When you’ve dragged in all the files you want, press Delete All and Inferno gets to work.

There’s a reason why Windows doesn’t delete files when you ask it to: it takes a hell of a lot of time to overwrite them several times. Windows – just like all other operating systems – wants to look fast. So now that you’ve set Inferno to work, get away from your computer, go drink some coffee and do something interesting. Depending on how securely you wanted the files overwritten, this can take quite a long time. But now you can relax, knowing your files are safe.