What file shredder do you use?

Whats a good free file shredder that won't mess up your hard drive and permanently delete files?

me personally using mcafee ( for the good shake I seriously recommend to all of you this antivirus / protection suite ) , there is an option to shred files / folders and so on works pretty nice . Used before '' east tech eraser '' with pretty good results it's cool piece of software ! highly recommended in case if you really need such strong measures to clean your hdd'(s)

None. The NSA has people physically destroy hard disks because of this fact.

mattcash said:

None. The NSA has people physically destroy hard disks because of this fact.

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Actually you don't need to be government agent to grab a damn hammer and smash your hdd

keinehabe said:

Actually you don't need to be government agent to grab a damn hammer and smash your hdd

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lol, angle grinders work even better
Honestly though, a lot of applications say "secure destruction." OR they say "NSA security standards!" It's just marketing.

Instead what they do is usually write a series of 0's of the portion of your hard drive where the contents are located. Sometimes they do that a bunch of times. Sometimes they write waves of 0's AND 1's! The issue? The nonsense stuff still leaves a different "signature" on the disk than the file that was there originally. That means with significant skill in data recovery (the stuff most police agencies would have access to) there is a chance they can still recover it. That's why the NSA just destroys the disks. Its pretty much impossible to "securely" delete data unless it was secure to begin with - like on an encrypted partition.

If you have something you need to keep safe, an ironkey may be a better option.

If you use Mac / Linux you can use the "srm" command which does a random 35 pass over-write of your file by default, or you can configure it to do single pass (DoD standard) or 3 pass (NSA standard) to save time.