Disk/File Shredding is Important

Most anybody knows that when you delete a file it is not truly gone. It is removed from an index, more or less, but the actual data remains. On top of that, even when overwritten it is often possible to recover part or all of the file (and there are some advanced physical techniques to restore even overwritten files).

Now, I am not a huge advocate for disk shredding 32 times and all that. I don't expect to be raided by the FBI, but I would say that unless you may want to restore something, you should at least go over it once to remove the extremely obvious traces.

For example, this is a picture taken from Restoration, a free utility to restore deleted files. It is a program that can see deleted files, but not if they are overwritten (but can see the unoverwritten parts of a full file). It is nothing too advanced... very easy to use. Here it is after scanning my flash drive, which I don't use much, but have stored many things on over the years.



Notice how far back some of these files go? I could click any one of them and restore it, and use it like in the past.

For a utility like Restoration, privacy on your hard disk is not an extreme issue, as it is made to restore recently deleted files (realistically it should be the first thing you open after accidentally deleting something). Look through the history on a hard disk and you'll see all kinds of temp files and some files from reserved spaces, but a personally deleted file is overwritten quite quickly.



The newest personally deleted file (my previous screenshot) is already moving down the list, and will most likely be overwritten in the very near future.

Eraser is a nice little Windows tool for shredding disks and files, and can be set to just erase deleted files, among other things.

This is the same flash drive after running eraser and it writing pseudorandom data. Notice the file sizes, dates, and you might be able to view some gibberish filenames.