NShred - free download

With NShred you can eliminate confidential information and data from PC hard disks. Name, size, contents of erased file or folder can never be recovered, by any software or hardware means. Also, you may erase free disk space, to eliminate evidence of already deleted files.

Why just deleting is not enough?

When you delete a file or a folder in WindowsTM it is not actually erased. Simply, the hard disk descriptor table is updated and the file entry is removed. So, the actual bytes of the file remain on the disk. Even when the file area is overwritten, it is still possibile to recover data, by applying certain laboratory procedures because it's rare that a portion of the hard disk is rewritten more than 3/5 times. It has been calculated that information is completely unrecoverable only after more than 30 rewrites.

How can NShred effectively destroy any data?

NShred detects the file area on the hard disk. This area includes metadata on file, such as name and date. The area is then rewritten n times depending on the procedure. For instance, with DOD algorithm, the file area is rewritten one times with "0" bit, then with "1" bit, then with a random byte.
After rewriting, the file area is reduced to zero, the file renamed with random characters and finally deleted. This procedure guarantees that not even a single byte from the former file can ever retrieved.

Why NShred is different from other shredding tools?

While the majority of shredding tools are "brute force" and "operating system agnostic" erasing tools, NShred behaves accordingly to the underlying Operating System (OS), denying the user the possibility to turn it unstable. The user will be able to erase it later when it is no more locked by the OS. Plus, NShred is a .NET Framework application, which ensure the user with a superior robustness and full compatibility and integration with the latest Microsoft Operating Systems and tools.

NShred may also run unattened via Task Scheduler.