There are many programs that can securely erase your files such as EraserDrop or Permadelete. But even if you use any of these file shredding tools, the data belonging to the files that you have already deleted using Windows in-built delete function could still be present on your hard drive. This is why it is essential to overwrite the free space on your hard drive to completely erase all the remnants of any files that were ever copied to your hard drive. Cyrobo’s Prevent Recovery is a freeware that helps you securely erase the free space on your hard drives and thereby prevents the possibility of any recovery attempts to uncover the files that were deleted from the hard drive.
Prevent Recovery has a wizard like interface that takes you from one step to another. In the first step, you have to select the hard drive partitions for which you want to wipe out the free space.
In the second step, you have to select a method that will be used to overwrite the free space. You can choose to fill up the free space with spaces, random characters, random numbers, random special technical signs, random characters and numbers etc. You can also choose to clear Windows pagefile upon next shutdown.
The third step is for selecting a secure erasing of the deleted data. There are eight popular methods available – DoD 5220.22-M, VSTIR, Gutmann, GOST R 50739-95, RCMP TSSIT OPS-2, Schneier, HMG Infosec Standard 5, US AR380-19, US 5020, CPRNG.
In the third step, you can choose whether you want to clear the MFT table which cleans up all the names of the files that have been deleted. You can also choose the percentage of free space that should be overwritten.
Finally, you can click on the Start button to proceed with the overwriting of the data in the free space of the selected partitions. Depending on the capacity of the hard drive and the selected overwriting methods, it may take more or less time to finish the job.
You can download Prevent Recovery from https://www.cyrobo.com/software/systm-en-allabout-prerec-.php.