Erase Disk

When you delete data from a hard drive or flash drive, it doesn’t have to stay deleted. Files can leave traces in the “empty space” that was just created, thus enabling file recovery software to restore your data easily.

If, for security reasons, you want to delete files from your drive permanently, you may also consider erasing the empty space they leave behind. It sounds a bit poetic, but in fact, it’s very practical, and a tool like Erase Disk can do exactly this job.

With this simple Java application, you can select any hard drive partition or removable disk connected to your computer and then easily clean its empty space. When doing this, programs will basically overwrite the traces left behind by various files with new information, which other file recovery programs won’t recognize.

Erase Disk has three ways of doing this: writing only with ones, writing pseudo-random data and writing only with zeros. You can choose to erase empty space with just one method or even with all three methods. This powerful option will see the empty space on your drive completely erased; the only way anyone could recover your deleted files is if they were sneaky time-travelers.

But depending on your drive speed, a full erase could take a really long time. If you just want a quick clean-up, you could go with the “write all zeros” option.

The program's best feature is that it doesn’t affect the files that are already on the disk, but only the empty space. This means that you could also use it to keep your drives clean without having to format them.

Be careful though, as this repeated operation may degrade flash drives. Otherwise, Erase Disk is a reliable tool if you want to permanently remove files from your computer storage.