DriveScrubber

When you normally delete a file or folder from your hard disk, the data is not completely deleted, but just hidden from the operating system. This means that anyone, with a proper recovery software, can get all that data back. In case you delete some confidential and personal files, then recovering them could become a real problem. To avoid such problems, you could use a special Windows software which can wipe your hard disk's free space.

One such application is DriveScrubber. This Windows program allows you to completely erase any hard disk and delete all the contents from it, beyond recovery, but also wipe free space from any hard disk partition. When running the software, you are able to choose one of the several options available in the interface. For example, you can wipe the free space from all the hard disk partitions or only from the partition where Windows is installed.

Besides that, you can completely wipe the contents of your hard disk. This is done by overwriting all the sectors where data is stored, for making the deleted files impossible to recover. Another useful feature included in DriveScrubber is the possibility of creating a boot disk, which can be used for wiping all the data from a hard disk, no matter if an operating system is installed or not on that computer. Unfortunately, this feature is not accessible from the evaluation version of the application.

In case you want to delete files and folders completely, without needing to wipe the free hard disk space, you can just enable the Incinerator feature included in the program, which adds an icon to the desktop, similar to the Recycle Bin. When dragging files to this icon, those files are completely erased and cannot be recovered.