Here’s a selection of tools that can perform this task and wipe a hard drive clean making it more secure before it leaves your possession.ĭBAN is a very well known and respected data wiping tool that runs from a bootable disc and is great for when you want to sanitize more than a single drive or system drive because it can automatically erase all found partitions. Another way is to completely wipe the drive or partition clean so no data at all is left on it and nothing at all can be recovered.
One way is to wipe the free space on the drive meaning only those files currently visible can be viewed. What you can do is make sure that before a hard drive, SSD or USB stick goes to somebody else, temporarily or permanently, any data that you don’t ever want to be read by others or recovered from these devices gets wiped clean and cannot be retrieved. The same thing applies to external storage media like USB sticks or memory cards, and these are perhaps more important as they are far more likely to change hands than internal devices. This fact is especially important if you are giving away or selling an old computer system / hard drive, or just letting someone borrow an external hard drive or even USB stick because the other user could easily recover data you thought was gone, posing a major security risk.Įven a format and reinstall of the operating system in that situation still doesn’t mean all the old data is completely safe from being recovered by others. Just click the “OK” button to begin the cleanup.A lot of computer users will know that when you delete a file, it isn’t actually completely gone from the system and can often be recovered with a simple piece of data recovery software.
If you want to play it safe, you can stick to deleting the items that Windows has already checked for you-most likely “Downloaded Program Files” (basically, temporary helper files for viewing specific web pages), “Temporary Internet Files” (a cache of old web pages stored on your computer to speed your browsing), and Thumbnails (the tiny icon images used for music, videos, pictures, and other documents on your hard drive, which your system can always regenerate later). In a second or two, the Disk Cleanup utility should open, complete with a summary of potential files to delete in your Windows “user” account and the grand total of disk space they’re using.
Related: Slow PC startup? You Windows startup programs may be to blame If your PC has more than one hard drive installed, you’ll be asked which disk you want to sweep up. Next, click the System and Security heading, then click the “Free up disk space” link under the Administrative Tools section. Getting started with the Disk Cleanup toolįirst, right-click the Start menu in the bottom-left corner of the screen, then click Control Panel.
The Disk Cleanup tool gives you a nice overview of all the junk files on your Windows 10 system, with files that you can delete without a second thought already checked. You can also click on other items in the list and decide whether you keep them or lose them after reading a brief description. The tool also found 274 MB of setup files used by Microsoft Office (which you don’t really need as long as you have your physical Office DVDs handy, or if you’re an Office 365 subscriber), 183 MB of “system error memory dump files” (which you can safely deep-six), and 164 MB of temporary Internet files, not to mention 116 MB of garbage sitting in the desktop recycle bin. You’ll find the Disk Cleanup tool in the old Windows Control Panel just right-click the Start menu to get there.Īmong the biggest space hogs that Disk Cleanup found on my system were several gigabytes worth of so-called “temporary files,” or spare data from my various programs that are supposed to be regularly purged.