The files that you have deleted using Windows delete function can be easily recovered using various freely available tools, unless you securely delete them using a tool like Blank and Secure. It is a freeware utility that can be used to wipe out the free disk space on your hard disk as well as delete the files securely. It can overwrite the contents of the files multiple times so that nobody can recover them even with the help of the recovery tools.
You can download Blank and Secure from the SoftwareOK website. The download is available as a portable application both for the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows. The downloaded file is less than 1 megabytes in size. After downloading, you can extract the contents of the zipped archive to a folder and run the program from there.
You can add files to be deleted in the Blank and Secure window by just dragging-and-dropping them onto this window. Once you have added the files in the list, you can click on the Delete or Delete + Exit buttons shown above the listbox. The files would be overwritten single time with null character and then erased.
You can click on the Overwrite 1 times to change how many times you want to overwrite the files. You can select to overwrite the files from 1 time to 35 times. The higher number of overwrites makes it harder to recover the deleted file. But if you select to overwrite files multiple times, then it will longer time to erase each file.
In addition to the secure file deletion features, you can also wipe out the free hard disk space. Free hard disk space is the space on your hard disk from which you have already deleted files – but the contents of files are still available. You can wipe out and clean all the remnants of the deleted files using this feature. You can access this feature from the top-left corner by clicking on Fill the free space with null and selecting a disk drive or folder (free space of which you want to wipe out).
Blank and Secure does not come with many options. For example, it does not give you any way to select what type of data should be used for overwriting the files. Neither does it allow you to select any of the popular erasing methods like Gutmann or DoD methods. It is a very simple and straightforward utility to securely erase your sensitive files.
You can download Blank and Secure from http://www.softwareok.com/.