How in the Tech

Ensure your deleted files stay deleted with MooO Shredder

By Adam Myers ⋅ November 9, 2009 ⋅ Tags: Privacy, Security

Many users may be surprised to learn that a deleted file isn’t actually removed from the hard drive immediately. If you ever wondered why file deletion was so quick while file creation took some time – this is why. When a file is deleted in Windows, and most operating systems behave similarly, it isn’t removed, only the reference to the file is removed. It’s the same idea of looking up the word flabbergast in the index of a book – once that word is removed from the index it makes it much more difficult to find it’s usage throughout the book, but not impossible. Once the reference to the file is removed, the hard drive is free to use the files previously allocated space for future file writes. Until that space on the hard drive is overwritten, the file can be recovered. Not as easily as you may see on shows like CSI, but it is still possible with readily available software.

You can imagine why this may be a problem for some. When a file is deleted, we want it completely deleted; not just de-referenced! Thankfully, there’s an app for that! MooO File Shredder is a fantastic free Windows application that can be used to securely delete files. MooO contains 4 levels of paranoia as it relates to the actual deletion. With each level the number of in the deletion algorithm increases. At the most basic level, the file is overwritten with random data once while changing the file name, size, attributes, and time stamp once. At the most insane of levels, this process is repeated many times over – leaving the original data unrecoverable. Repeating a few of this steps up to 35 times is likely overkill for most anyone, but choices and options are rarely a bad thing.

The process is straightforward and simple. With MooO open and the appropriate algorithm selected from the Method drop-down, just drag and drop the file(s) you wish to shred into the application interface. MooO handles the rest of the heavy lifting for you.