Soft191 Shredder

Soft191 Shredder provides a fast way to securely delete files and erase free disk space. Data is overwritten (1 to 10 times) prior to files being deleted.

The program resides in the system tray, and includes a 'drop zone' which is a small icon that can be moved around the screen and to which you can drag drop files/folders for shredding/deleting. The drop zone can be turned on or off.

The two main purposes of the program are to shred/erase files and wipe free disk space.

Shredding a file means that its content is firstly overwritten (wiped) and then the file is deleted. You can choose which files to delete by using the "File" and "Folder" buttons, or you can 'paste' a list of existing file and folder names from the Windows clipboard using the "Clipboard" button.

Alternatively you can use the 'drop zone' icon (which can be moved around the screen) to drag files/folders to from other programs (like Windows Explorer), or to paste a list of files/folders from the clipboard.

Note: If you abort the file shredding process (by pressing the "Stop" button), the file will more than likely be corrupt because some of its data was wiped/shredded.

Wiping the free space on a disk means that any data which still resides in that free space, albeit marked 'free', can be properly and securely deleted by overwriting it. As you may know, simply deleting a file via Windows does not actually delete the content of the file. Instead, the space that file occupied on the disk is simply marked as being 'free', and may exist for a long time until another file is allocated that space (or part of it).

The program can be customised, as can be seen by the screenshot of the options dialog below: