Most people have some data that they would rather not share with others – passwords, personal information, classified documents from work, financial records, self-written poems, the list can be continued forever.
Perhaps you have saved some of this information on your computer where it is conveniently at your reach, but when the time comes to remove the data from your hard disk, things get a bit more complicated and maintaining your privacy is not as simple as it may have seemed at first.
Your first thought may be that when you ‘delete’ the file, the data is gone. Not quite, when you delete a file, the operating system does not really remove the file from the disk; it only removes the reference of the file from the file system table. The file remains on the disk until another file is created over it, and even after that, it might be possible to recover data by studying the magnetic fields on the disk platter surface.
Before the file is overwritten, anyone can easily retrieve it with a disk maintenance or an undelete utility.
There are several problems in secure file removal, mostly caused by the use of write cache, construction of the hard disk and the use of data encoding. These problems have been taken into consideration when Eraser was designed, and because of this intuitive design and a simple user interface, you can safely and easily erase private data from your hard drive.
Eraser is a Windows utility that allows you to securely erase files, file slack space or cluster tips (the space that is not occupied by the data in a file, but nonetheless allocated to that file by the operating system), Windows virtual memory swap file, unused space on a hard disk, or an entire hard disk or floppy disk or Zip disk or the like. It is able to wipe data using pseudo-random data (or any combination of data that you specify), any number of times you wish (eg, once, or using the US Department of Defense (DOD) recommendations of either 3 times or 7 times, or the Gutmann recommendation of 35 times, etc). It is also able to erase the filenames in the directories for files you delete. The program is open source and works under Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP.
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