There’s also a component for wiping insecure Windows and program files, such as temporary files and Flash Player cookies, ensuring you keep your activities secret.īackslapping all round, then, but what about data you’ve previously deleted? No problem, O&O SafeErase can wipe all that supposedly free space where the remnants of past files still reside. O&O SafeErase also includes tools for securely wiping clean all traces of your internet browsing, from cookies and downloaded files to the pages you’ve visited. IE, Edge, Chrome, Firefox and Opera are supported. At its most basic level, O&O SafeErase can wipe files with zeroes or employ one of five more thorough, secure (and slower) methods recognised by such luminaries at the US Department of Defense to ensure files deleted from your computer can’t be recovered – by you or anyone else. Thankfully, O&O SafeErase Professional is designed to give you an option for ensuring data you want deleted really does get deleted beyond the point of no return. But until that space is physically overwritten by other data, it remains accessible and retrievable.

In order to prevent performance grinding to a halt (and save wear and tear on your hard drive), Windows simply marks the file as deleted, which means its header is overwritten and the space it resides is marked as available for writing to.

The reason data is so easily recoverable is that it’s not physically deleted from your hard drive when you empty the Recycle Bin or bypass it entirely. That might be reassuring for those who don’t believe in backups, but for the rest of us – with potentially sensitive information to look after – it’s worrying. Anyone who has experienced mind-numbing data loss will be relieved to learn that data can actually be recovered from your hard drive for a good period of time after it’s supposedly been erased. It’s tempting to think that when you delete a file from your PC that’s it, it’s gone forever.

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