After hard deletion and TRIM, good luck recovering anything usable. e /i” will obfuscate each and every file and directory names in the flattened selection without prompts, duplicates or errors. For instance, in XYplorer, batch renaming such a selection to “deleted. I know quite little about file systems and storage devices, so someone more knowledgeable might want to correct or add to this opinion.Ī file manager able to flatten a root directory down to he last subdirectory will allow “one click renaming”. Once TRIM/garbage collection is executed after deletion, everything seems to be pretty much gone. This will actually multiply processing time and hardware activity.Īfter emptying recycle bin, you might have concerns that files are still recoverable, which they are.įor %%c in (C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z) do (Īs for secure deletion on SSD, a “renaming before deletion” script is enough confidentiality for me.
– ‘-p 1’ might be set higher for the truly concerned. The script will then be launched by selecting files and directories in a file manager and making use of the “send to” context menu. Shortcuts to these batch files should be added to the user profile “send to” folder. Sdelete is still a great tool but the article should maybe put more emphasis on the fact that it is useless and should be absolutely avoided with anything other than mechanical, rotating hard drives.Īlthough a command line utility, sdelete profits greatly from shell integration by means of “send to”, for instance the script below:Ĭan be saved as batch file, adding warning messages and confirmation pauses as needed (recommended). You may also want to SDelete GUI, which is a graphical user interface version of the app, and our guide on creating a shortcut for drag & drop operations. SDelete is a handy, tiny program which you may use to delete files or folders securely, and to process free space on hard drives so that any content that was once store on those drives cannot be recovered anymore. It is recommended to run recovery software afterwards on the path to verify that the files cannot be recovered anymore. Deleting individual files securely is pretty fast, but it may take hours or even longer if you run the operation on large folders or free space of entire hard drives. The length it takes depends on the selection. The operations may take quite some time to complete. The -z parameter overwrites the free disk space with zeroes instead which is faster. SDelete uses the Department of Defense algorithm by default when it deletes files, folders or free disk space.
One easy option to open the SDelete folder on the command line is to open it in Windows Explorer, type cmd in the Explorer address field, and hit the Enter-key.