Permanently erasing sensitive electronic documents
When you have printed documents and need to dispose of them, what do you do? If the information on the documents is of no import or value, you can simply toss them in the trash. But, if those papers have sensitive records and financial information on them, you need to destroy them in such a way as to make sure they can never be read again. The common way to destroy documents like this is to run them to a paper shredder. High quality paper shredders tear 50 sheets of records into confetti style pieces that are so small they can never be reassembled. So what do you do when you have sensitive electronic files you need to permanently destroy? We do the same thing, only instead of a paper shredder we use a file shredder.
A file shredder is a program designed to mix up and scramble all of the underlying coded information from your files that is stored on your computer’s hard drive. While you might think that simply deleting files removes information from your computer, this is completely untrue. Deleting a file merely removes the name on that file and marks the space the file used as available to be written onto. Anyone with a basic data recovery program can access your files and restore them. However once a file shredder has been used to tear apart the basic file information into infinitesimally small pieces, those files can never be reconstructed and opened again. Online file shredder reviews seem to continually point to the Remo Software file shredder as the best program of this kind.
See also: