Secure Delete: What Does it Do? A computer is home to a plethora of an individual’s personal information, from phone numbers and addresses of friends and family, to account passwords, bank account numbers and other financial information. It would not be an exaggeration to say that a great amount of your identity may be found in your computer. If the computer is ready for the recycling pile, you certainly don’t want that information available to any computer savvy dumpster diver. When you need to erase this private information from your computer, a regular format simply will not provide you with the clean slate you are looking for. This is where the secure delete becomes useful in eliminating the private data.

	There are different levels of formatting a computer; from a simple or full format that leave some of the information on your computer untouched to a reformat with the reinstallation of an operating system. Each of these levels of formatting does not necessarily eliminate the information on your computer, but rather designates the area that housed the files as “free space”. At this stage, at best, the deleted files may be scrambled, but certainly not irretrievable. As new information is saved to the drive, the old information is overwritten. Once the new information has written over all of the old information, it is then much more difficult to retrieve. Until then, your files may be recoverable. A secure delete is used to completely sanitize the drive, or metaphorically, to wipe the slate clean. Sensitive data on your computer can be completely eliminated, making it irretrievable by would be identity thieves. The secure delete process takes file elimination another step further, beyond formatting. Secure delete applications are used to overwrite the deleted files right away, rather than allowing the flow of new data to overwrite the old files over time. The files are deleted, the space is designated as "free space" by the computer and the secure delete application writes over the deleted files, thus making them irrecoverable. When a secure delete is performed correctly, and with an adequate software application, it eliminates every type of file present, from common digital signature files to compressed and encrypted files. It even overwrites the free space remaining on the drive to ensure complete sanitization. For further assurance that the files are completely gone, you can often adjust the number of times the deleted files are overwritten. Recovering files erased by a secure delete is not a simple procedure and there is never any guarantee that the files can be recovered at all. The software available to recover files is directed toward files deleted from high and low-level formatting. As discussed previously, these formatting procedures simply make the “deleted” information unavailable. The information remains and can be retrieved before it is overwritten. To recover files deleted by the secure delete application, a forensic data recovery service will be required because of the complexity of the recover process once the files have been deliberately overwritten in the secure delete process.
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