There was a small introduction on how files are recovered from magnetic media in the last post. In that post I had said about using repeated overwrites to render a file unrecoverable. Sdelete is a command line utility that can wipe off a file and its traces completely from your hard disk without leaving a chance for recovery. If you have some data that you don”t want others to know about, you can “securely delete” it using sdelete.

sdelete is a tool from sysinternals to erase data from Disk drives completely. It can delete data from USB drives, floppy drives, or hard disk drives. sdelete can also cleanup the freespace avilable on any drive with zeros and delete directories recursively.

You need to download the zip file from sysinternals site, extract it to C:\WINDOWS or C:\WINDOWS\system32 folder (or you can add the folder you are extracting to the PATH variable in Windows environment). so that it can be directly accessed from command prompt.

Usage :

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

sdelete is free, light and installation free. You can control the number of passes (overwritings) that has to be done and moreover previously deleted file data can also be cleaned using the free space cleaning facility.

Download sdelete(free) (47Kb) , Visit sdelete webpage on Sysinternals

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