You can view a detailed guide on their Eraser’s website, but simply put, you just need to point it to a file or folder and it overwrites it with random data. Although it’s designed as an advanced-level data security tool, it has a really simple user interface and is incredibly simple to use. The patterns that Eraser uses for overwriting are based on data from researchers or government agencies, with the sole purpose of rendering the data unrecoverable even to the most skilled hard drive recovery expert. The best thing about eraser, though, is that it’s free, and the source code is released under GNU Public License.

The free software overwrites the data on your hard drive several times with specially selected patters, and is currently supported on all versions of Windows from XP onwards. Eraser has been around for years, and is an advanced security tool that allows you to completely remove data from your hard drive. A simple, free and effective tool is Eraser.

On a traditional, mechanical HDD, you need to make sure that those 1’s and 0’s making up your data are well and truly overwritten. But as explained above, your data could still be recovered by an amateur with access to basic, free data recovery software, let alone a hard drive recovery expert. On a Windows machine, if you want to delete a file, you just press the delete key and if you want to bypass the Recycle Bin altogether, hold the shift key as you’re doing so. What these eraser tools do is wipe over every sector of your hard disk drive with random data, so not even the most experienced hard drive recovery specialist will be able to recover your data. What you actually need to do is undertake a process known as ‘sanitisation’, which can be done using third party software. Moving the deleted files to the recycle bin won’t do the trick either, and not even formatting your hard drive will render the data unrecoverable. In the past, we’ve demonstrated that, with the use of free data recovery software, you can recover data that’s been deleted pretty easily. When you hit the delete button on a file, all your operating system is doing is marking the space they’re taking up as free until something else needs to be stored there. All data on a hard disk drive is stored as a series of 1s and 0s. When you delete a file, it isn’t ‘deleted’ in the way you think it is. If you’re erasing data from a hard disk drive – whether for throwing it away or resale - you’re going to want the data gone forever, especially if it contains sensitive information.

Disk eraser