I’ve been having an issue lately with my Recycle Bin not completely deleting. Even when I try to empty the Recycle Bin it still is showing that there are files undeleted, 24 of them to be exact. Initial thoughts are that it’s a virus or malware of some sort, but I have no other symptoms of something along those lines going awry.
A friend recommended I try the program Eraser. Eraser provides US Department of Defense reliable file deletion controls. So, I downloaded the program and ran the installation package to give things a try.
Although Eraser didn’t fix the issue with my never-emptying Recycle Bin, it does provide some nice features that I think will cause me to keep it around for some other uses as needed.
When you delete files from your system, you’re really not “deleting” them. You’re actually marking the space on the hard drive that was being used to store them as now being available again for overwriting with some other data’s information.
If you really want to get rid of files you need to delete and overwrite them with some other data. Eraser provides this functionality and wraps it all in a very simple and useful interface for end-users.
One of the other interesting functions available, is that you can select a specific file to be used to overwrite the data you’re trying to delete. Eraser said this was part of a plausible deniability feature.
If you’re looking to delete files from your hard drive and to make sure they’re gone, download and install Eraser.