Nobody plans to have secret files, they just somehow happen to accumulate over a time period of many years on your hard disk. For example, my bank sends the e-statements every month, I save these PDF files on my hard disk and I consider them private files. At present I have such private files in the order of many hundreds. When you have to switch the hard disk or want to say goodbye to these files, you must shred them securely or someone can recover them easily using tools like Recuva. Among many other tools that we have mentioned on TrishTech.com, you can use SSuite File Shredder portable tool to easily shred any of your sensitive, secret files containing your private information.
The SSuite File Shredder utility is portable and does not depend on any type of runtimes like Java runtime environment (JRE) or frameworks like Microsoft .NET. You can just download the ZIP archive of this tool, extract the contents to a folder and launch FileShredder.exe from there.
The user interface of this utility is very simple. You can click on the Add Files button to select the files that you want to shred and add them to the list. If you have added a file accidentally, then you can select it in the list and click on the Clear File button to remove it from the list. The Clear List button allows you to clear all the files from the list so that you can start over.
You can choose the number of times you want to overwrite the files. By default, it auto-selected 35 times, but a higher number of overwrites can reduce the life of your SSD, so choose this number wisely. Usually 2-3 times of overwriting the files is sufficient.
There is also an option to encrypt the files which encrypts the files data using 64-bit simple encryption cipher, further ensuring that files are shredded very securely. As you click on the Shred button, it starts to shred the files in the list after showing a confirmation dialog.
Conclusion: SSuite File Shredder is a simple portable file shredding utility. It helps you to do away with the files that contain sensitive or private data and that you no longer want to keep on your hard disk. It can also encrypt the files before shredding them ensuring that files are disposed off in a much more secure manner.
You can download SSuite File Shredder from http://www.ssuitesoft.com/ssuitefileshredder.htm.
Any endorsement of such is likely based upon a gross ignorance of drive io subsystems.
> my bank sends the e-statements every month
Much like a gross misunderstanding of email. Even “secure smtp” has a weakness.. well two important ones: sloth, and fallback.
> secret files containing your private information.
Are best kept in encrypted containers: archives, or mounted volumes
TrueCrypt is a great place to teach some correlations between
Security & Privacy
> life of your SSD,
Is governed by more esoteric principles. Leading people to believe this product is other than snake oil is less than swell