Windows shredder

I’m looking for a file shredder application for windows, was wondering if anyone could recommend. I found a couple including Eraser but it seems to have issues with Win 10. I don’t know. Something portable would be ideal.

Thanks

Take a look at this site maybe.

Just note that if it’s an SSD, wear levelling means that the file contents could still be there. It may be harder to recover, but if you are a person of interest to authorities or crooks then there are ways of recovering the data. Best to switch on whole disk encryption BEFORE you put any important data on the drive.

If you have a SSD in your system, you want to be careful about using any file overwrite tool with too much abandon… it will cause extra work for your SSD memory cells and shorten its lifespan.

If you’re looking for a quality product in this domain, and don’t have Windows Pro, or don’t trust Microsoft, then check out VeraCrypt:

1 Like

If you are concerned about cleaning out a drive going out of service, there are tools like DBAN.


If it’s a SSD, most SSD manufactures have a secure erase ability built in. (I believe the quality ones use cryptography from day one, and when you secure erase them it is virtually instant because they merely overwrite the key making the data infeasible to recover. The cheaper ones just apply high voltage to all cells at once, quickly zapping their contents.) Look on your SSD manufacture’s web page for their secure erase utility.

Thanks all. My use case is simply being able to delete a few sensitive files off a personal computer. The files shouldn’t be there in the first place but sometimes you have to make due with the circumstances you’re in. Want to make sure that at least they are properly shredded off the HDD. It might be an ssd.

Another suggestion if you have control of the circumstances: If you have a nice chunk of RAM (say 8G or more) then you might consider putting these sensitive file in a RAMdisk while you are working with them. Then “erasing” them securely is as simple as powering off the computer for a minute or so. I’ve mentioned elsewhere that AMD gives Radeon RAMDisk for free for up to 4G RAMdisks.