Table of contents
What lessons can we take away from my story? They are, in fact, quite simple and obvious: merely deleting files and quick formatting is usually not enough when disposing of or selling hard drives. For more assurance, it’s better to perform a full format (in modern operating systems, of course). And for the truly paranoid, there’s the good old console utility SDelete from the Sysinternals suite or a tool named... - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
I assume you were using a dynamically expanding disk - if so just note it won't dynamically contract just by deleting files. To shrink the drive you will likely need to run sdelete -z on the drive inside the VM to clear the free space, then edit and compact the VHDX. You will need to be able to boot the VM to run sdelete though so you'll need to temporarily move other files off the drive, or move the VM files to... Source: 11 months ago
You can always download sdelete https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sdelete and do an overwrite pass just to be safe. It'll take a while but you can do other things while it's running. Source: 11 months ago
My understanding is that it doesn't completely solve it. I don't have time to dig up an authoritative source for this claim — hopefully this superuser comment will suffice. I believe that you can achieve something close to a secure erase by filling up your SSD to 100% capacity with data before deleting; the utility sdelete supposedly does this when using the -c option. Source: about 1 year ago
Check out sdelete from the MS sysinternals utilities suite: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sdelete. Source: about 1 year ago
If it is Windows then you want to use sdelete. Source: about 1 year ago
Try login via safe mode and use sdelete if you've tried everything else...... Not sure why this would be needed though, ive had similar issues just restarted PC and been able to delete the folder/file. Source: over 1 year ago
Seriously though, if you can, completely clean your stuff off the computer, search history, browsing history, cookies, etc. Delete files using something like SDelete if you can. Source: over 1 year ago
Alternately use some way of overwriting the empty space on the mounted VC container / drive. I use sdelete a lot. This can (repeatedly) over write empty space - including the areas you had your deleted file in. Run it a for a few passes and any remnants of the file should be gone. Source: over 1 year ago
You don't need to download filler data. Just do an empty space wipe with SDelete: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sdelete. Source: over 1 year ago
I disagree with bradland. There are plenty of programs to overwrite the disk with zero's in order to delete traces of deleted files, in spite of the fact that a program doesn't manage memory and doesn't decide which part of the disk memory it is allocated: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sdelete. Source: almost 2 years ago
If you are running windows, look into sdelete, which will allow you to securely delete (there was a hint in the name) without rebooting into something which may or may not recognize your USB dock. Sdelete. Source: almost 2 years ago
I usually do the quick format, mount it, then copy the data to it if you have it already. Then before I go to bed I run sdelete64 -z on the drive. It fills the drive with zeros and deletes them, this finishes the format of the rest of the drive which will overwrite any previous data with encryption. So write speeds will be optimum and any data that was on the drive will be encrypted. Source: over 2 years ago
The next step depends on how secure you want it to be. The better way would be to use a secure delete program like this one >> https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sdelete And delete your user profile which you can find in c:\users. Source: over 2 years ago
Correct, this will only overwrite the free space. You could also use SDelete, also from Microsoft - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sdelete. Source: over 2 years ago
I’ll assume you’re on Windows. In that case, file shredding is done by Windows’ sdelete package from system internals (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sdelete). Shredding a file on and SSD is always more difficult than on an HDD, but because sdelete is from system internals, it deals with the NTFS file system better than any other shredder simply because it’s developed by Microsoft itself,... Source: over 2 years ago
I usually use TestDisk + PhotoRec to recover deleted and damaged files and SDelete to securely delete data from the NTFS/FAT drives. The utilities are absolutely free, no strings attached, but they require working with the command line. Source: over 2 years ago
Yeah, it does that pretty often, unfortunately. Here's the reason. Unlike macOS and Linux, which have built-in command-line shredding features (rm -P on macOS and shred on Linux), Windows doesn't have a built-in command to shred files. So, I have to bundle sdelete64.exe from Microsoft System Internals along with Picocrypt in order to provide a secure shredding function. There are two options for distributing these... Source: almost 3 years ago
Wipe Free Space only deletes the remainders of files already deleted. Existing system restore points won`t be touched. You might want to read up on the inner workings of NTFS a bit; here`s a more thorough explanation of how this sort of disk cleanup works: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sdelete. Source: almost 3 years ago
Thank you for helping me test and sharing the informative screenshots! Yeah, I kind of suspected that was going to happen. The issue here is that when shredding a file on Windows, Picocrypt calls a system internal (which is the only secure way to shred a file), which can only be accessed through https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sdelete, which means that I have to pack sdelete64.exe along... Source: almost 3 years ago
If you are using Windows use sdelete to securely wipe files. Source: about 3 years ago
Do you know an article comparing SDelete to other products?
Suggest a link to a post with product alternatives.
This is an informative page about SDelete. You can review and discuss the product here. The primary details have not been verified within the last quarter, and they might be outdated. If you think we are missing something, please use the means on this page to comment or suggest changes. All reviews and comments are highly encouranged and appreciated as they help everyone in the community to make an informed choice. Please always be kind and objective when evaluating a product and sharing your opinion.
