File Shredding Programs - Do they work?

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Priva

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Nov 21, 2013
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There is a program called "File Shredder" It has options for shredding files so they can't be recovered by anybody. Say somebody had something on their computer they wanted to hide from the police such as illegal software / games and they used the 35 passes option to wipe the file. Would this program do a good job making sure the files are completely gone so NOBODY can recover it?

EDIT: I'm also curious as to if this works on a SSD or not. I know SSDs are different than hard drives of course and they might operate differently when it comes to storage. When you delete a file from your SSD does it actually get deleted? Or is it like a hard drive and remains there until another file overwrites the old one?
 
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cetus35
Hi Priva,

File Shredder is pretty good but I prefer Eraser because it has plenty of features to select when, where, and what you want shredded/wiped. It's free.
Read the review here: http://pcsupport.about.com/od/data-destruction/fl/eraser-review.htm
and Download it here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/eraser/

If you've read up much since you posted here, you know by now that there are data destruction "schemes". Each scheme was put together by individuals, companies, governments, etc. However, what the name of the scheme is doesn't matter much, they basically determine the number of passes and what the passes consist of as they're overwriting the file or files you want gone.

By what they 'consist of' I mean that they overwrite...
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Priva

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Do you know if a file shredder would actually work though? I'm also curious if they work on SSDs. Not just for illegal software but if I was to ever sell the SSD It'd be nice to know that people can't run Recovery software on my hard drive and SSD
 
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ttjambe

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The DOD has a standard number of passes for zero writing before a drive is resold. Even then data can probably be salvaged using magnetic resonance if you had a powerful enough machine. No it is not nearly as effective as a hammer to the drive (the physical destruction of the drive). For the average user this probably won't matter because one hard drive is not worth risking the data.
 
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Priva

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Can people use a program like Recuva (free recovery software) to recover a file from your SSD? Because I know hard drives just allocate the space when you delete a file from it and the file isn't actually deleted until something else overwrites that file. From what I read online SSDs don't operate that way. So how do I stop people from running a program like Recuva on my SSD? Or when a file is deleted from the SSD does it actually get permanently deleted?
 
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ttjambe

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Keep in mind that the machine I'm referring to costs more than the average sub-urban home and is loaned out to corporation and government agencies to recover data worth way more than the pictures of cats I have on my drives and probably yours too. If you're really paranoid just destroy the drive. Unless your selling your computer to the NSA no average user is going to take the time to go to that extent. When you reformat the drive, the data becomes unorganized, and if you write over it unrecoverable. You can try it yourself with Recuva if you'd like. It takes a lot of work to recover data, which is why you pay companies to do it. Frankly no "average user" is going to spend hours digging up your data. Just boot and nuke. That's an OS for deleting files, google it, I find it works better than software solutions.
 
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cetus35

cetus35

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Hi Priva,

File Shredder is pretty good but I prefer Eraser because it has plenty of features to select when, where, and what you want shredded/wiped. It's free.
Read the review here: http://pcsupport.about.com/od/data-destruction/fl/eraser-review.htm
and Download it here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/eraser/

If you've read up much since you posted here, you know by now that there are data destruction "schemes". Each scheme was put together by individuals, companies, governments, etc. However, what the name of the scheme is doesn't matter much, they basically determine the number of passes and what the passes consist of as they're overwriting the file or files you want gone.

By what they 'consist of' I mean that they overwrite with 0's, 1's, or random data.

A couple of them, for example:

1) The 'Peter Gutmann' method (aka just 'Gutmann') consists of 35 passes with random data.

2) The VSITR wipe pattern method consists of 7 passes with alternating 0's and 1's then randoms characters for the last pass.

3) The DoD 5220.22-M Wipe Method was developed by the US Government and the Department of Defense. It consists of 3 passes of 0's, 1's, then random data then verifies that all 3 passes were indeed written.

So as you can see, the 35 passes you mentioned are way, way, way overkill for a home user just wanting to make a file or files unrecoverable. Note that the Department of Defense says 3 passes is enough to wipe sensitive goverment data. Plus that many passes can be extremely time consuming depending on what you're wiping.

Yes, SSD's and even USB flash drives can be wiped.

Anyway, I hope that helps answer what you were asking about.

As always,
Hugh

EDIT: If you intend to discard an old drive on which bank, credit card, taxes, or any other data you wouldn't want someone to dig out of the trash and run a data recovery program on, it's best to do a whole drive wipe (note that the programs that will wipe an entire drive are sometimes different than the ones used to wipe files. Just Google for a 'drive eraser' or 'drive wiper') then destroy it with a hammer.

However, a recent article I read said that in a particular data recovery lab (where labs, researchers, time, and money are not an object) were able to recover a small portion of data from a piece of a smashed drive platter the size of a pea.


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