Free Space Wipe

If you choose to delete a file via the standard mode – delete it and then clean Recycle Bin – then you are probably aware of the fact that that file is not completely gone. What happens here is that the newly freed space is marked for overwriting and can be recovered with specialized tools.

Free Space Wipe is a dedicated tool designed to completely remove files deleted and hence, prevent recovery software available on the market from undeleting it.

Following a quick and uneventful installation, you can select the drive that you want to clean as well as the type of wipe. The application provides three types in this sense, namely overwrite the space with All 1's, All 0's and blocks of binary data.

The latter are up to 1GB in size and hence, it may take some time for the process to complete. It is important to note that the binary data method can take even longer if it is not derived from the background wallpaper bitmap file for the user and thus, needs to create the block randomly.

The program works with all sorts of drives, including network drives, temporary folders and standard drives. The speed of wiping network drives depends on the connection speed and it is generally slower than the other methods, unless that drive is directly attached to the PC.

According to the developer, the tool is designed to prevent standard programs, that you can commonly find on the market, from recovering the file. That does not mean that advanced structures such as the CIA or FBI cannot undelete it. Instead, Free Space Wipe can come in handy if you decide to sell a drive and want to make sure the new owner cannot recover personal files from their new acquisition.