Shredding is a process of completely removing data from your hard drive. Remember – even if you delete files from your hard disk, the data still remains in the hard disk and could potentially be recovered.
If you’re going to sell your computer’s hard drive, you probably need to shred the files present there because you might have stored sensitive information on there earlier and wouldn’t want anyone to get access to it.
Eraser is a wonderful free files shredder that could do the job of shredding files on your hard drive. You can download it from this page. Here’s a quick how to on how you can use Eraser to shred files in your hard drive easily:
- Launch Eraser by clicking on the icon on your desktop
- In the Eraser window menu bar, choose File > New Task
- To perform file shredding on the free space of your hard drive, leave the first option selected and choose the drive where the shredding should happen
- To shred specific folders, select the second option and choose the folders whose files need to be shredded. If you want the files in the selected folder’s subfolders to be shredded too, check the Subfolders option
- To shred a particular file, select the third option and browse through to select the file that should be shredded
- Click OK
- You should see a new task listed in the Eraser window
- Now select the task and click the Run icon from the Eraser toolbar. Otherwise, press Ctrl+R
- The selected shredding operation will now happen
- Alternatively, you can shred files/folders from within Windows Explorer itself by right clicking and choosing Erase.
Hope you found this how to on shredding files on your hard drive helpful. If you’ve got any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments.