1. Oct 19, 2018  If, however, the files and folders you want to remove are still in your Recycle Bin, Eraser can securely move these in place. Simply right-click the Recycle Bin and choose “Erase.” If you’ve.
2. How to Securely Delete a File Anchor link Click the File menu and select Shred Files. A file selection window will open. Select the files you want to shred.
3. Nov 29, 2011  App Directory: The Best System Tweaker For Mac. Nov 29, 2011, 5:30am. Securely delete files in your trash. While TinkerTool definitely gives you plenty of tweaks, you'll also.
4. Jan 10, 2008  Tip: If you're trying to delete a file that wasn't completely downloaded or copied, check out this document. Tip: In Mac OS X 10.3 Panther or later, you can securely delete items by choosing Secure Empty Trash from the Finder menu. If you change your mind about deleting the item before you choose Empty Trash: 1. Click the Trash icon in the dock.
5. Apr 14, 2020  If yes, please kindly note that we need to convert to the Files Tab to delete the file as the following picture shows: If I misunderstood you, please tell us more details with this query such as a screenshot, it will give us a better understanding for it. Thanks for your time and efforts.
6. As you can see that the advanced uninstaller will detect all of related files and provide an overall removal for those associations. Therefore, you can totally uninstall TinkerTool with ease without too many manual steps and any other further removal issue.

Jun 13, 2013  Another option: Delete the files the conventional way, empty the recycle bin, then use CCleaner to overwrite your drive's free space. This extremely useful tool can do all sorts of Windows scrubbing chores. You'll find CCleaner's Drive Wiper tool in the Tools tab.

When it's time to donate or ditch an old flash-memory drive that stored sensitive information, deleting those files isn't enough. The safest way to wipe the slate clean is actually to encrypt it -- and that's not as hard as it sounds.

The computer industry’s migration from hard drives to flash drives has mostly brought good things. Flash drives work faster and, since they store data in solid-state memory instead of on spinning magnetic platters, they also work longer.

And they’re a lot smaller. If you’re not sure if your external drive is flash or not, seeing if it fits cleanly into a shirt pocket should is your easiest cue, followed by its complete absence of noise.

But when it’s time to wipe a drive so you can sell or donate it to somebody else, flash drives impose complications that hard drives don’t: Because they automatically move bits of data to less-used areas of the drive to extend longevity, the traditional secure-erase technique of overwriting files with random data may not clear out all of it.

That’s why Apple removed the “Secure Empty Trash” command from the macOS Finder in 2015’s El Capitan version. It didn’t want people thinking they could scrub a file from a drive when the attempt might not succeed on a flash drive.

You can still use the method of dumping random data three times in a row on an entire flash drive, although tools to do that are less than obvious in both Windows 10 and macOS High Sierra.

On a PC, open the command prompt from the Start Menu and type “format e: /p:3,” (if “e” isn’t the letter for the flash drive, change that accordingly). On a Mac, open the Disk Utility app, select the drive, click “Erase,” then click “Security Options…” and move the slider control to the third, “3-pass secure erase” option.

Mike Cobb, director of engineering at the data-recovery firm DriveSavers, noted that your flash drive’s vendor may provide an app with simpler secure-erase tools, pointing to ones from Intel, SanDisk and Samsung.

Can Tinkertool Securely Delete Files Windows 10

The other reason to avoid this method is that it can be painfully slow on large drives--a 2017-vintage Windows laptop needed 22 minutes to do a triple overwrite of a 4 GB flash drive.

Encrypting the entire drive to make its contents unreadable without a key--then erasing it and encrypting it again--takes much less time to make your data disappear. Both Cobb and Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist for the Center for Democracy & Technology, endorsed that strategy.

On a Mac, right-click the drive you want to wipe and select “Encrypt” and then follow its prompts. If you don’t see that prompt, it may be because the drive was formatted for use with Windows systems; open Disk Utility, select that drive, click “erase” and go with the default settings. Either way, you’d then use Disk Utility to erase the drive, then repeat the encryption step. Finally, erase it in Disk Utility again to leave it free for the next user.

Things are a little more complicated in Windows, thanks to Microsoft not supporting disk encryption in the Home editions of Windows. (Dear Microsoft: Home users care about privacy too.) If you run a home version of Windows, you’ll have to use the open-source VeraCrypt app for this task.

Install and run it, then click “Create Volume” and then “Encrypt a non-system partition/drive.” Choose “Standard VeraCrypt volume,” click “Select Device” and then “Removable Disk”--where you should only see one drive selected, assuming you unplugged other external drives first.

After encrypting the drive, reformat it (right-click it on the Windows desktop and choose “Format…”), then repeat the encryption step. Reformat it a second time so the next user doesn’t get a prompt to decrypt it.

This is a bit more work than taking a crowbar to a dead hard drive. But learning how to encrypt drives--a must if there’s any risk of somebody stealing your computer--is worth going to that trouble.

Rob Pegoraro is a tech writer based out of Washington, D.C. To submit a tech question, e-mail Rob at rob@robpegoraro.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/robpegoraro.

By Mark Russinovich

Published: December 11, 2018

Download SDelete(221 KB)

Introduction

One feature of Windows NT/2000's (Win2K) C2-compliance is that itimplements object reuse protection. This means that when an applicationallocates file space or virtual memory it is unable to view data thatwas previously stored in the resources Windows NT/2K allocates for it.Windows NT zero-fills memory and zeroes the sectors on disk where a fileis placed before it presents either type of resource to an application.However, object reuse does not dictate that the space that a fileoccupies before it is deleted be zeroed. This is because Windows NT/2Kis designed with the assumption that the operating system controlsaccess to system resources. However, when the operating system is notactive it is possible to use raw disk editors and recovery tools to viewand recover data that the operating system has deallocated. Even whenyou encrypt files with Win2K's Encrypting File System (EFS), a file'soriginal unencrypted file data is left on the disk after a new encryptedversion of the file is created.

The only way to ensure that deleted files, as well as files that youencrypt with EFS, are safe from recovery is to use a secure deleteapplication. Secure delete applications overwrite a deleted file'son-disk data using techiques that are shown to make disk dataunrecoverable, even using recovery technology that can read patterns inmagnetic media that reveal weakly deleted files. SDelete (SecureDelete) is such an application. You can use SDelete both to securelydelete existing files, as well as to securely erase any file data thatexists in the unallocated portions of a disk (including files that youhave already deleted or encrypted). SDelete implements the Departmentof Defense clearing and sanitizing standard DOD 5220.22-M, to give youconfidence that once deleted with SDelete, your file data is goneforever. Note that SDelete securely deletes file data, but not filenames located in free disk space.

Using SDelete

SDelete is a command line utility that takes a number of options. Inany given use, it allows you to delete one or more files and/ordirectories, or to cleanse the free space on a logical disk. SDeleteaccepts wild card characters as part of the directory or file specifier.

Usage: sdelete [-p passes] [-s] [-q] <file or directory>...
sdelete [-p passes] [-z|-c] [drive letter] ...

How SDelete Works

Securely deleting a file that has no special attributes is relativelystraight-forward: the secure delete program simply overwrites the filewith the secure delete pattern. What is more tricky is securely deletingWindows NT/2K compressed, encrypted and sparse files, and securelycleansing disk free spaces.

Compressed, encrypted and sparse are managed by NTFS in 16-clusterblocks. If a program writes to an existing portion of such a file NTFSallocates new space on the disk to store the new data and after the newdata has been written, deallocates the clusters previously occupied bythe file. NTFS takes this conservative approach for reasons related todata integrity, and in the case of compressed and sparse files, in casea new allocation is larger than what exists (the new compressed data isbigger than the old compressed data). Thus, overwriting such a file willnot succeed in deleting the file's contents from the disk.

To handle these types of files SDelete relies on the defragmentationAPI. Using the defragmentation API, SDelete can determine preciselywhich clusters on a disk are occupied by data belonging to compressed,sparse and encrypted files. Once SDelete knows which clusters containthe file's data, it can open the disk for raw access and overwrite thoseclusters.

Cleaning free space presents another challenge. Since FAT and NTFSprovide no means for an application to directly address free space,SDelete has one of two options. The first is that it can, like it doesfor compressed, sparse and encrypted files, open the disk for raw accessand overwrite the free space. This approach suffers from a big problem:even if SDelete were coded to be fully capable of calculating the freespace portions of NTFS and FAT drives (something that's not trivial), itwould run the risk of collision with active file operations taking placeon the system. For example, say SDelete determines that a cluster isfree, and just at that moment the file system driver (FAT, NTFS) decidesto allocate the cluster for a file that another application ismodifying. The file system driver writes the new data to the cluster,and then SDelete comes along and overwrites the freshly written data:the file's new data is gone. The problem is even worse if the cluster isallocated for file system metadata since SDelete will corrupt the filesystem's on-disk structures.

The second approach, and the one SDelete takes, is to indirectlyoverwrite free space. First, SDelete allocates the largest file itcan. SDelete does this using non-cached file I/O so that the contentsof the NT file system cache will not be thrown out and replaced withuseless data associated with SDelete's space-hogging file. Becausenon-cached file I/O must be sector (512-byte) aligned, there might besome left over space that isn't allocated for the SDelete file evenwhen SDelete cannot further grow the file. To grab any remaining spaceSDelete next allocates the largest cached file it can. For both ofthese files SDelete performs a secure overwrite, ensuring that all thedisk space that was previously free becomes securely cleansed.

On NTFS drives SDelete's job isn't necessarily through after itallocates and overwrites the two files. SDelete must also fill anyexisting free portions of the NTFS MFT (Master File Table) with filesthat fit within an MFT record. An MFT record is typically 1KB in size,and every file or directory on a disk requires at least one MFT record.Small files are stored entirely within their MFT record, while filesthat don't fit within a record are allocated clusters outside the MFT.All SDelete has to do to take care of the free MFT space is allocatethe largest file it can - when the file occupies all the available spacein an MFT Record NTFS will prevent the file from getting larger, sincethere are no free clusters left on the disk (they are being held by thetwo files SDelete previously allocated). SDelete then repeats theprocess. When SDelete can no longer even create a new file, it knowsthat all the previously free records in the MFT have been completelyfilled with securely overwritten files.

To overwrite file names of a file that you delete, SDelete renames thefile 26 times, each time replacing each character of the file's namewith a successive alphabetic character. For instance, the first renameof 'foo.txt' would be to 'AAA.AAA'.

The reason that SDelete does not securely delete file names whencleaning disk free space is that deleting them would require directmanipulation of directory structures. Directory structures can have freespace containing deleted file names, but the free directory space is notavailable for allocation to other files. Hence, SDelete has no way ofallocating this free space so that it can securely overwrite it.

Download SDelete(151 KB)

Runs on:

Can Tinkertool Securely Delete Files File

• Client: Windows Vista and higher
• Server: Windows Server 2008 and higher
• Nano Server: 2016 and higher