Every time you delete a file or folder from your PC, by emptying your recycle bin, you really don’t permanently delete them. Instead Windows removes the index for that file, hence why we can use recover tools to restore deleted files. Luckily for us we can use SDelete in Windows 7 to make sure no one can recover our data.
If you want to permanently delete a file in Windows then you can use a free program called SDelete, on of the sysinternals tools provided by Microsoft. With this tool you can overwrite the contents of free space so nobody can recover the data with third party tools.
SDelete Windows 7 Hard Drive
Using SDelete is easy too, you just need to use the command prompt a little bit, don’t worry I’ll show you how it works. First download, link below, and unzip SDelete into a directory you can navigate to in the command prompt. Then launch the command prompt, type CMD in the start search or by pressing the Windows Key + R and typing in CMD.
Navigate to the directory you unzipped SDelete and type in sdelete.exe. This will give you an example of what this tool can do.
From the syntax above we can see that using the switch will wipe our data. So if we wanted to securely wipe your old hard drive you would use the following syntax below:
sdelete –p 3 –z Drive Letter:
Just replace “Drive Letter” with the one you want to wipe. The switch –P represents how many passes it will do, by default it will do 1, so we set it to 3 for our hard drive. The switch –Z is used to clean free space. Just remember you can tweak what you want it to do by changing the number of passes or by adding another switch.
SDelete is a small utility, about 47 KB in size, but will permanently delete your feels. You can even have this on your flash drive.
Download SDelete from Microsoft
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