Secure File Deletion: How You Can Permanently Delete Files

OK, you've highlighted a file and pressed "delete". That's the end of that file. It's gone forever, isn't it?

Err. No. It's still on your hard drive.

You see, computers - and especially computer programmers - take short cuts. And one of the short cuts is that they don't actually delete a file when you click delete. Sometimes, this can be useful as it means that if you didn't really want to delete a file, no problem.

But how can you make sure that a deleted file stays completely deleted? Maybe you're passing your old PC onto someone else and you don't want the new owner to have access to all your passwords. Maybe you had a number of confidential files from work and you need to make sure that they're not kept on your hard disk any longer than needed. Maybe it's some email correspondence you don't want anyone else to get hold of.

Whatever the reason, simply pressing the delete button just won't do the job properly.

Unless you can guarantee that no-one else will ever have access to your computer, you've got to ensure that any files that need to be deleted forever really are deleted permanently.

This means that you're going to need some help from a software program. The only other way is to format your hard disk tens of times and hit it with a big hammer until it breaks into so may pieces even the biggest jigsaw addict would give up.

The good news is you can download some affordable software that makes securely deleting files an absolute breeze.

It will randomly write data to the area on your hard disk your file used to occupy. Not just once or twice (that's still too easy to recover) but tens of times. Once it's finished, not even the most powerful computers in the world would be able to read the contents of the file.

So if you've got files you want to delete forever, you should download this inexpensive software!