What Is Secure Delete?

You know the feeling. You've got a document that's so sensitive that you could scream. It contains the secret recipe for your company's new flavor of ice cream, or it's the list of all your employees' birthdays. You want to ensure this information falls into the right hands, but how do you know that? Data deletion is not something to take lightly. The last thing you want is for someone to find a way to recover your deleted files and get their hands on your company's trade secrets. How do you make sure it's gone? That's where secure delete comes in. Secure delete is a process of data deletion that ensures that the deleted file cannot be retrieved. This process is essential for protecting sensitive data appropriately, as it removes any way for outsiders to mine discarded storage hardware for data. Secure deletion can be achieved in many ways, and several software applications that claim to have this functionality have been developed. Secure deletion is also known by other names, such as "secure erase" or "hard drive shredding."When you delete a file in Windows, it's not gone. It's just moved to the Recycle Bin and marked as available for use by other files. What if you want to ensure a file is completely erased? You could drag it to the Recycle Bin and empty it, but you need more! Even if you bypass the Recycle Bin entirely by using the shortcut key Shift+Delete on a file, all you've done is tell your computer that the area where that file was located is free to store other files. Until another file is written over it or the drive gets formatted, it will stay in its original disk sectors. Was there a way to ensure all those old files were utterly erased from the hard drive? Well, there is! Secure delete is an extra security measure that ensures every bit of data has been overwritten before being removed from your hard drive.