Disk Wipe and Data Eraser

Disk Doctors Data Sanitizer work not only by unlinking a file but also specifically overwriting them with garbage data. For very high security installations, overwiting the file several times is advised. Many government institutions have specific disk wiping standards for file deletion. Particularly, the U.S. DoD specification 5220.22 standard says a file must be overwritten three times.

Disk Wiping Overview

Disk wiping is beneficial for privacy, because files are not completely deleted using operating system's default delete function. In most of the file systems, delete function consists of marking the space occupied by the file as free and updating file system allocation structures, leaving actual file contents intact on the storage media.

If there is continous read and write operations on the drive after deletion, eventually this space will be assigned to other files and would be overwritten. However, if the there hasn't been much of read and write operations since the file was deleted, data recovery software or disk forensic tools have a good chances of retrieving deleted data in chunks or in whole by accessing the disk drive.

So normal 'delete' command or deleting data from the recycle - bin is not a safe method for data removal.