How to Shred your Digital Documents to ensure complete Privacy

Recycle Bin is an appropriate name for the place you dump unwanted documents and other PC files, because it’s about as secure as chucking bank statements into a plastic box outside your front door. Anyone can see what you put there. Even when the contents disappear into a dustcart, or into apparent digital oblivion by right-clicking and choosing ‘Empty Recycle Bin’, thieves can still access your paper or digital leftovers until they’ve been shredded, pulped and turned into egg boxes or unrecoverable data.

File Shredder Tool is a free new program from NoVirusThanks – maker of trusted security tools including SWF (Flash) File Blocker and Smart PC Locker – that completely and permanently obliterates your unwanted data. Once you use it to delete files, no-one can ever restore them using file-recovery software. Simply emptying your desktop’s Recycle Bin doesn’t offer this level of security.

This tool offers various blitzing methods. The simplest, a single-pass overwrite, is the quickest. More powerful methods such as three- and seven-pass overwrites take longer. The maximum 35-pass overwrite, known as the ‘Gutmann’, should take care of any internationally classified documents you’ve got hidden away, but the obliteration process could take hours.

For such a brutal-sounding tool, File Shredder is very easy to use. It integrates with your right-click menu so you can remove files without launching the program, or you can drag and drop files into the program window.

Click Free Download to get the installer. Windows 10 tried to warn us off running it, but the file is perfectly safe, so choose ‘Run anyway’. Installation is very quick and there are no unwanted extras.

Click Add Files and choose files to obliterate from your PC. Alternatively, drag files on to the program window. Click Erase to start deleting the files completely.

Click Add Folder to add a whole folder of files to be blitzed in one go. You can add as many files as you want, as big as you want – but bigger files mean slower blitzing.

The Settings window lets you configure each removal by, for example, choosing an overwrite level. You can tick ‘Shutdown when finished’ when deleting huge files.

By default File Shredder integrates into Windows (File) Explorer’s right click menu, but you can switch this off in Settings if the menu is getting too cluttered.