Are you about to sell your old computer? Then you may have already cleaned the hard drive and installed the operating system so that it is "brand new" so it can be used by the buyer. In that sense, we have bad news for you, since formatting the hard drive does not guarantee a safe way to delete files.
Today, a large number of people already know that this situation is one of the most common that occurs; what many do not know, is the reason why all those files that we have tried to delete have not been permanently deleted, despite using certain tricks that suggest a safe way so that they are not recovered at any time. If you want to delete files from your hard drive so that no one can recover us, then we suggest you review this article that is dedicated exclusively to it.
Use a third-party application to safely delete files
First of all we want to suggest to the reader a small comment about the reason why the files are not reached safely delete when we have sent them to the recycle bin. This situation apparently would not have been adopted by Microsoft in any operating system of its authorship due to how expensive it would be to have to make a permanent deletion of these files, as well as the time that it represents. You will realize this situation if you use a tool that we will recommend in this article, which has the name of hardwipe and with which, if we can delete files permanently.
The first thing you have to do is head towards the official website to download and install this application, and must subsequently define a few parameters for the removal to be successful; Once you have installed the tool, we suggest you go to the options menu and specifically to «Tools"And then to"Options«.
The image that we have placed previously is what you should do with what we suggest in the procedure. At that very moment, a few options to safely delete files. Some of these guided options you may come to recognize easily, although instead of being guided by the name or code suggested there, you should rather pay attention to the number of steps that each procedure will use.
Now, you must take into account that the greater number of steps to delete or delete files is to be configured through this option, the longer it will take for the system to perform this task. Thus, a process that involves a single data overwriting step in this deletion will be much faster than the one that suggests 35 steps.
Of course, a procedure that involves all 35 steps would guarantee that deleted files will not be recovered under any pretext nor with any specialized application. You should also consider the power of the computer, which means that if you use a more specialized procedure (such as what we have mentioned) to delete files safely, the processor and different Windows resources will be the ones that work hard on the computer, reason why you will come to notice that the heatsinks work hard. On a low-resource computer, it is not recommended that you use this procedure, as it will take too long that you will not want to wait for it to complete.
Once we have lightly defined the correct way to choose each of these processes from the tool's configuration options, you only have to exit this area saving the changes and nothing else.
The most interesting of all becomes evident when we go to delete a file; With the installation of the application, a few additional options will have been created that we will see in a contextual menu. For example, if we choose a file (or an entire directory) with the right mouse button, there an additional task will appear that will suggest us to delete the file by means of a «Wipe File», option that has been placed by the installation of the tool.
The suggested above only involves a selective deletion of files in Windows, coming right here, a sound advice that you should follow if you are about to sell your computer with the hard drive included. If you have previously formatted the hard drive, This does not guarantee that in the free space that you can theoretically admire there, this void. A specialized person could occupy some tool that has the ability to scan every last byte of this hard drive.
For this reason, within the same application you must go to the option found on the left side that says «Free space«, An option that will eliminate any type of waste that is still present in the free space of your hard disk.
Because the process can take a considerably long time, It may be convenient that you schedule the computer to shut down when the whole process has finished. You cannot get to know if it will last between one to eight hours, so you must use the programmer that is included in this same application, where you can order the computer to turn off after having completed all the elimination tasks data safe.