Most people assume that deleting a file is final. When the Recycle Bin has been emptied or the storage media formatted, they usually think that any data stored within is gone for good. As such, people often donate or sell their old computers or storage devices after formatting them or simply restoring them to default factory settings. What they don’t tend to realize, however, is that any data previously stored on the device is likely to be recoverable using specialized software. Sometimes, data recovery software is the perfect solution if you accidentally empty the Recycle Bin or format a disk but, there will no doubt be other situations where you need to make certain that nobody will ever be able to get hold of your private data.
These days, people rely on digital media for storing everything from personal information and payment details to various other private documents and other files. If you plan to donate or sell an old computer or smartphone, for example, you’ll want to make sure that no one can ever get hold of your personal data, and that’s exactly where data shredding utilities come in. Active@ ZDelete is a product that’s the result of years of research and development by one of the world’s leading developers of data forensics teams. It allows you to securely delete data by overwriting the original content with zeros, multiple times if necessary. As such, it makes retrieval of the data completely impossible, regardless of the type of media used.
What most people don’t realize is that data lingers on a digital storage device until it is overwritten by another file operation. In other words, formatting a disk or deleting a file only tells the file system to mark the previously occupied space as available. None of the original data is deleted at this point and, until something overwrites it entirely, it will still be recoverable, either in part or in full. Although using the storage device progressively increases the chances of the old data being overwritten, data recovery operations are often still successful months or even years after the files have supposedly been deleted. Active@ ZDelete helps to make sure that this doesn’t happen by overwriting the original data using multiple passes for extra security.
The latest version of Active@ ZDelete was released in December, 2016, and includes various new features and improvements. The Disk Wipe procedure has been overhauled entirely, and it works with any storage volumes created in Windows, MacOS, Linux and Unix. The user interface has also been overhauled to improve performance and ease of use. In fact, the graphical user interface provided fully integrates with Windows/File Explorer and Internet Explorer, along with support for drag-and-drop and hotkeys. More advanced users can choose to take advantage of the optional command line interface as well if they prefer. Finally, there’s even a replacement option for the Recycle Bin.
To try out this powerful data shredding software, download the freeware version today from http://www.zdelete.com . The full version is also available here for only $29.