I downloaded and installed BitRaser at 1:13am US Central time. It's now 2:23am, the offer ends in 37 minutes, and I haven't received a registration key...

But where is the Verification Code?! ...Because this webpage is asking it: https://www.stellarinfo.com/registration/bitraser-for-file.php

But where is the Verification Code?! ...Because this webpage is asking it: https://www.stellarinfo.com/registration/bitraser-for-file.php

This American developer has been in the software business for several years and in that time earned user plaudits and favorable tecchie reviews worldwide for the quality of its data recovery programs. As the corporate logo on its website pages is "Stellar Data Recovery", and its trading entity is Stellar Data recovery Inc, no surprise there then.

What is a little surprising is the company's inclusion of data erasing and data recovery software in its portfolio -- not because they're mutually exclusive, but because the software industry is absolutely chock full of data wipers / cleaners / erasers, and has been for a long time. The competition for home users is intensive, which perhaps explains why Stellar doesn't actually feature BitRaser in its home use range at all, but only its business range.

On which basis then, its facility to generate erasure certificates for audit purposes is in some cases going to be relevant -- but for home users, irrelevant. And sadly, that's the only significant difference which seems to exist between BitEraser and all the other programs, free and paid-for, out there. Nothing in its promotional material addresses the software's ability to out-perform that home-use competition, not even the mention of 17 different "international algorithms" (such multiplicity is pretty much meaningless anyway.)

Nowadays, an increasing number of home computer users have (sensibly) taken advantage of the decreasing price of SSDs to divide up their PCs into a small capacity SSD for the Windows OS and a much larger capacity HDD for data.

In my case, if I have need to wipe the so-called 'Free Space', I use my ancient copy of CCleaner Free, select the 3-pass cleaning option -- because with modern HDDs, nothing higher is necessary -- set it running last thing at night, go to bed, wake up and have breakfast in the morning, and the job's done. For an individual file or folder I'm not bothered about, delete to Recycle Bin is all I need; alternatively, any of the free multi-pass shredders out there, from Bleachbit to Privazer to Erazer to you-name-it, takes care of that.

None of this is to suggest that the vast amount of freeware out there is superior to Stellar's offering. But it is to say that for home usage, buying any commercial cleaning / wiping / erasing / shredding product makes little financial sense. Stellar is a good and honest company, and I wish it well, but BitRaser is not any kind of quantum leap in the home user market and as such today's offer -- that grudging 6-month trial period aside -- lacks a USP persuasive enough to download and try it.

As always I appreciate all the offerings made on GAOTD but I am going to give this one a miss for several reasons. First a half-year license on a product which I would use a handful of times is restrictive. Second the retail price of $40 is excessive when there are a plethora of freeware products which do the same. Third, and most important, I couldn't find anything on the publishers website describing how it works with SSDs which require special attention by writing a pattern to the entire disk to ensure that there are no remnants of your data hiding is areas masked by the onboard load leveling techniques. With SSDs you also don't have to run multiple passes to eradicate sensitive issue, one-pass is fine and without the developer stating that it's multi-pass for magnetic media and single for NAND-gate (SSD, USB stick, memory cards, etc.) you could be shortening the life of such devices.

CCleaner does all this for free.

Why is it needed if there is a "PrivaZer"?