Now Lets Securely Delete Files
by Nathan on Feb.10, 2008
Every week I listen to Security Now a podcast hosted by Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte. The other week I found out that most File Shredding programs don’t actually delete the files in the correct manner. A file isn’t deleted until its place on disk has been allocated to another file. This is the reason there are so many file recovery programs available. So what are we suppose to do if we want to delete a file and be sure it can never be recovered again? We download SDelete from Sysinternals and put it to work. SDelete is a command line utility and personally I don’t like having to type in a long command just to delete a file. So I wrote up a nice little batch program. You can either drag and drop one file, or one folder and it will delete the item using SDelete. All you have to do is download the batch file to the same directory as SDelete.exe and your good to go. Also the batch file tells SDelete to do five passes, just to make sure your item isn’t coming back.
Download SDelete.exe http://download.sysinternals.com/Files/SDelete.zip
Download delete.bat http://throwthemind.com/tools/delete.bat
In the last few days I have shown you how to encrypt and decrypt any file, and securely delete any file (unencrypted ones) all running off a USB Dive without Administrator access on a Windows machine. I hope you get use out of this, I know I do.
Thanks
Nathan
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Welcome!
My name is Nathan Warner. I am a system administrator in Huntsville Al, member of Makers Local 256 and a not-so-active Geocacher. Huntsville isn't the best city to have fun, so a lot of the time I make it fun. I helped start Makers Local and right now am working on @HSVsh a scavenger hunt in Huntsville. All of my contact info is at the bottom of the page. Thanks for stopping by!
February 10th, 2008 on 6:01 pm
Good content last few days Nathan.
BTW your page load times are killing me. What is with your host?
Either way great work.