BleachBit is a computer cleaning software that works on Linux, macOS and Windows. It can remove all the junk files, leftover entries and the user tracks from the computer. The main reason why people use it is for removing the history of the web browser or for wiping the hard drive. BleachBit can also irrecoverably remove the files from your hard drives so that they cannot be recovered even by computer recovery professionals.
BleachBit can be used to shred files or folders easily. Here is how:
- Launch BleachBit and click on its icon in the top-left of the window. In the menu that is displayed, you can choose to Shred Files, Shred Folders or Shred Paths from Clipboard. If you select the third option, then it will shred the folders or files, paths of which you have copied to the clipboard. In case you have selected the first two options, you will have to pick the target files/folders that you want to shred.
- It will ask you to confirm the permanent removal of the selected items. Click Delete if you want to continue the shredding of the selected items. There is no going back after this, so choose carefully.
- It will start to delete the files after overwriting them with random data. A log of the process will be displayed in the BleachBit window. In the end, you can see the summary of the shredding process.
There is another way of shredding files using BleachBit – using its command line interface. It comes with a CLI version both with the installer format and with the portable version. You can invoke the following command to shred files or folders using the command line version of BleachBit:
bleachbit_console.exe --shred [path]
where [path] is the full path of the files or folders to be shredded. For example, if you want to shred D:\BleachBit-Portable\DUMP.ZIP then you can give the following command:
bleachbit_console.exe --shred D:\BleachBit-Portable\DUMP.ZIP
This will result in the shredding of those files. However, it does not show any progress. It just displays a summary at the very end of the shredding process.