How to Erase Your Hard Drive Completely

Before you sell away or throw your old Hard Disk Drive you need to make sure that you have completely erased it and this is important because you could have copies of your Important data stored in it and this can go to the wrong hands. Just doing a normal format is not really going to clean or wipe of all the data stored in it because the data is still there but the computer shows you that its deleted.

This is because whenever you delete a file, the computer would delete the record of the file’s location on the hard drive, which is stored in the Master File Table or the File Allocation Table. In short this means that the computer would show you that the files are deleted but they are still available on the Hard Disk Drive and these are overwritten only when there is new data stored in the Hard Disk Drive.

There are many Data Recovery Software’s in the market like Easeus, which claim to recover data even from a formatted drive, which means that even a full format of your Hard Drive cannot guarantee you that all your data is cleaned and removed. This is when we need tools which can securely delete Files from a Hard Drive. Without using any tool its still possible by over writing some useless data again and again, which would mean that all the tables in the Hard Disk are occupied and there are no chances of recover the previous data.

Using a software and Erasing all your data is more beneficial than having other people getting access to your Personal Information, Passwords, Classified Documents of office, Financial records etc. This is the reason we recommend you to check out Eraser which is a advanced security tool for Windows allowing you to remove sensitive data from your Hard Drive by overwriting it several times in different selected patterns. This is a Free Software, hence what all you are investing here is your time and keeping yourself secure.

Eraser is a advanced security tool which has a user-friendly interface for normal users, helping them execute tasks in schedules. Before you start using this software you need to understand that, it works on the basis of a Task, which means that you need to set few targets which would perform based on the schedules you have setup.

First step is to click Ctrl+N which would perform a ‘New Task’ and would show up Task Properties option. Under the Task Properties, you will have to set the options based on your personal selection. If you select the option of ‘Run Immediately’ the software will start running once the options are selected. Also you can setup schedules while selecting the recurring option and give the pattern details.

Types of erasure targets :

• File targets specify that file to be erased.
• Files in Folder specifies a folder for erasure, and the include mask specifies a WILDCARD EXPRESSION to include files for erasure, and the exclude mask specifies another Wildcard expression to exclude files for erasure.
  o The include mask is applied before the exclude mask; a blank include mask includes all files and a blank exclude mask includes all files.
  o Combinations of the two are supported.
• Recycle bin specifies that all files in the current user’s recycle bin is erased.

You can erase browser files, by first closing the browser completely and performing the action. Similarly while you try to delete other files, there may be chances of errors, hence its recommended to select the option of Erasing on Restart option while most of your other applications are still closed.