Writing over (wiping) the drive with ones or zeros one time is sufficient for modern high-density drives. Contrary to urban legends, no one has been able to retrieve data from a wiped drive. Free space, boot sector, reserved space, and bad blocks must all be wiped.

Zorgon wrote:
"Most welknown method of erasing is ‘Gutman’ by writing a series of 35 patterns over the region to be erased."

If you are going to start referring to someone's "method", at least read his paper which he has since said is not applicable to modern disk drives. The 35 patterns CANNOT all be written to any drive. They are different patterns for different drives depending on the drive type and formatting. Please look up his paper and read it.

@18 Eddy:
Eddy, if your HDD is from an old IBM laptop, they had a built-in BIOS password, that if you used, prevented the HDD from being used in a different computer, and even in the same computer if you didn't know the password.

That thing is so tight, that even IBM can't recover data without the password.

So, if it's locked like that, nothing will recover your data.

I download the Tenorshare Data Wipe and find it helpful for my problem! It is a good tool!

I need such a tool urgently! Hope this small tool can wipe out all my iPhone 4 data. Because I plan to sell my iPhone 4 and buy an iPhone 5. By the way, can you offer a tool to transfer my iPhone 4 data to my new iPhone 5? Thank you in advance!

Will this make a bootable cd where you can use later and wipe a dive ?

#8, ws: on simple flash USB sticks or SD Cards etc no write leveling is performed on them so a simple single pass overwrite should be sufficient as writes to flash media is preceded by an internal erase cycle that pretty much removes any significant reminance of the previoius bit states in each erase/re-written cell.

Now on modern flash based SSD drives they incorporate write leveling technology that can mean multiple sucessive writes to a given logical sector can go to different physical memory cells meaning that when one tries to overwrite a file that the original data could still exist in the low level memory cells it did before you atetmpt the overwrite. Also it is possible that the design retains a cache of private cells used to replace failed cells automagicaly which also form part of the write leveling system and allow leveling to continue even when every user accessible logical sector is in use and holding data that cannot be changed by the write leveling procedure.

It is also possible on IDE and SCSI hard drives that errored data fragments can be mapped out of a file and no longer be accessible by the standard firmware to erase... but custom engineering firmware could make every physical sector on a modern IDE/SCSI drives accessible and those remapped sectors partial data recovered.

Some drives have "nuke me" type command that bypasses the user ATA interface and ensures a secure total erasure that continues even if power is removed, when the power is restored so I am told. Never had to use such a drive/command so cannot confirm or deny the information.

As an old-timer I prefer to know a little something about a company I have any dealings with, particularly running their code on MY machine. Whois lists a privacy domain host for tenorshare. Without some details and their 'proficient' grasp of the english language I think I'll pass on this one. Thanks anyway GOTD (btw tenorshare-put some real info in your about us tab and you'll do a lot more to placate potential customers)

@ 2 states - This tool claims to perform wipe or erase actions but doesn’t let you choose how to do it! I have a software that gives various options in wiping! DOD - Dept of defense - 3 wipes, NSA - 7 WIPES, Guttman - 35 wipes, and Random 1+ wipes! The more times you wipe the longer it takes to do the job! Seems to me setting of how to delete would be important in a program like this! A person wouldn't need more then simple wipe for ninty nine percent of their stuff and higher setting for sensitive data! Don't feel comfortable with this program if it doesn't have setting for higher wipes for sensitive data - banking records, etc!

Remember, encrypted file passwords scan all be hacked.

I have found that if you use this or similar products, your hosts and registry will be rendered useless. Not even system restore can recover removed files and if you reinstall your operating system you will have a hodgepodge of junk. If you have secrets you feel are incriminating, use a dos program. If you don't know dos, learn it.

The jury is back in for me and this doesn't make the cut.

First of all there are indeed numerous freeware versions of this kind of utility out there all over, but second, to be candid, the only thing I can find good about it, for my purposes, is that it has an attractive GUI. Very similar to the PCTools GUI Designs.

First: It doesn't tell you whether its registered or not, and there seems to be no way to find out. You can only presume so.

Second: Its buttons have no text titles and no tooltips either. So the only way to know what they do is to click them. (Not a good idea, especially for a program that is intended to WIPE Partitions and the like).

And last but certainly not least, it simply doesn't work. (XP Pro SP3).
When you add an item to be wiped it gets a system-memory write-error every time. Rebooting or approaching it in different ways doesn't help. Its always the same kind of "Application Error".

This not to suggest the concept wasn't viable. But for me its a thumbs-down for numerous reasons.

Uninstalling! But thanks all the same GAOTD..

-JC

Based on a brief perusal of the support information, only certain data in cellphones (i.e. the files you see when you link you computer to your cellphone) is "erased". I don't see any support for email, csll, log, etc. deletion.

I use dban for hard drives where the information is not considered too sensitive. A sledgehammer is recommended to and used by my clients in high risk situations to ensure maintenance of confidentiality.

Obscure developer. Obscure software. Unknown erasure algorithm. Blatantly suspicious user reviews (including anything from Scott S Dale of Arizona.) And puffed-up website claims that're downright hilarious:

"Over years, with a vast amount of international awards, hundreds of thousands of customers worldwide, Ternoshare has since grown into an award-winning brand with over 30 products and a solid reputation for delivering high-quality and easy products.

Yeah. Right. Thanks for the laugh, GOTD: the day this 'Ternoshare' (sic) outfit manages to produce evidence of just one award -- one, mark you -- from the 'vast amount' it says it has won is the day sensible folks might just DL and try out their software. Until then . . . No thanks.

#15 method would be ok if the hard drive is to never be used again, however if you are handing it down to another (selling it or giving it to a family member) then physical destruction is not the answer.

I suggest encrypting the entire drive before you do any type of wipe/erase. That way even if the wipe does get recovered, the data would be appear to be garbage and useless. If encrypting it for a wipe, then use a crazy long random key (generated by mouse movements etc.).

If you know the drive is going to contain sensitive data then you already should have it encrypted anyway. Encrypting the data before it is stored is the best safety measure to protect your data.

I have a Hard drive from an old laptop , I want to delete the windows opearating files from it , but anyway I try it just sends my round in circles ending up saying I dont have permission , even though i'm the only admin etc .
Will this clean it off ?

Hmmm DataWipe... If you really want to make that data unrecoverable..
Use a hammer on the thumb drive & THERMITE on the hard drive ;)

It seems to me that this field is loaded with software that claims to do the Military format. I have not tested this one... just seems that if you look around on the other file sites... you will trip across them.

PSam

I had some experience with Tenorshare software products. I used Tenorshare PDF Converter and it installed a PDF toolbar into MsWord and Excel. Unfortunately, it created problems with all the Ms Office copy and paste operations. I uninstalled Tenorshare PDF Converter and discovered it had an excessively large number of registry entries.

Apparently the software coding is not flawless.
So I am staying away from this GOTD giveaway of Tenorshare Data Wipe.

@3 Tracy. Correct, they are funny people not only the reviews but even their entire website text is one big joke 'Ensure your End-of-Life Data are Erased Securely' . Beside this lotsa lotsa blabla, like at the bottom: Our products have won awards worldwide. Yet all logo's of (ofcourse totally unknown) ratingsites have no links to the respective websites; the only known is Brothersoft: nothing mentioned about 'Awards worldwide', not even reviews, no stars, no ratings, and not suprisingly 'Last Week downloads: 0, Total downloads: 20' Wow, so impressing !

Also there is a quite serious lie: Alert: The wiped data are unrecoverable (including another spelling mistake) but while my brief testing really gave opposite results, as Recuva recovers EVERYTHING (talking about responsibility...)

This are defenitely no serious developers, just a bunch of cowboys who think they are. This kind of unskilled people are polluting the internet with their funny adventures.

Downloaded - tested - failed - uninstalled. After running this software on a file with hi-res and low-res images and several textfiles, ALL data could fast and easy be recovered with Recuva. (from Piriform, the people from CCleaner) Same results you will get with FileShredder, Iobit's fileshredder and TuneUpUtils fileshredder and several others. All are useless software. If you want to secure wipe your date use KillDisk, seriously. Cheers ;)

(@#1) Is tenorshare a pseudonym for or similar to wondershare, SHARING your sensitive data Before wiping them out - to CIA NSA and others in the liga?

downloaded,installed,registered easily,win 7 64bt.seems to be a decent program.trying it now deleting a windows old folder in dual boot system i was having problems with due to permissions issues.folder is over 10 gbt in size. now at 28% after about 20 min.will see how it goes and post again.thanks gotd and tenorshare.

A very simple program at every level, the choices are to wipe a partition, or folders or files, possibly too simple as it gives no indication in the help files as to how it erases data. You have to be very trusting to rely on this program.
A free program that offers many choices of what and how to erase data can be found at the following link:-
http://sourceforge.net/projects/eraser/
A few years ago I tested an erasing program on a 250 gig drive, I wiped the unused space, and then did a recovery using ICare which to my horror found many, many files that should have been erased.

My advice is, if you use a program to wipe data, test it with a good recovery program just to be on the safe side.

If I use today's giveaway Tenorshare Data Wipe to accidentally erase my data, can I recover my data using Tenorshare Data Recovery Pro?

Question to the developers:
How do you ensure secure and complete erasure on flash media??? (as you might see, I doubt this a little...)

For the remainder: I not even need a tool for erasing HDs etc: I wrote a very small circular batch routine (!) which would delte all files/folders of a media and than fully fill it with freely chooseable patterns.
Remember: Nobody could (till now) really prove, that data could be recovered from fully overwritten areas; thus a double refill is more than sufficient.

Conclusion:
For free? OK -- but as there exist tons of other an even free solutions I´m only eager: Will it really do the job on flash media...

Well if you use Memory Card/Mobile Phone/Digital Camera almost almost on a daily basis and are eager to keep your sensitive data inaccessible to anyone, I think you should give this GAOTD a try, since most of free/paid similar programs out there do NOT support such portable devices.

Other than that you can skip today's giveaway, which is for sure worth much more than 30% THUMBS UP, and use FREE tools instead... these:

BEST FREE ALTERNATIVES

* (Portable) Freeraser
http://www.freeraser.com/home/82-freeraser.html

* Portable Files Terminator (==> Great Italian FREE APP)
http://elefantsoftware.weebly.com/files-terminator.html

* Puran Wipe Disk (==> Can even delete the files system)
http://www.puransoftware.com/Wipe-Disk.html

Enjoy!!

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Seems to lack one crucial mode and that is erase entire drive, including MBR and the buffer sectors from the sector 1 to the start of the first partition where certain OS's install extra data and some malware can hide themselves away from OS based security software.

Also remember if you're using any Volume ShadowCopy Service based System Restore or previous versions based system on the target system and it's active on the drive you are trying to wipe files and folders on... you need to disable VSS operation on that drive to free the space used by the VSS store and in addition to wiping the target files, you need to wipe the free space to erase traces of the data stored in the VSS store. If they do not mention any of this in their documentation for a best practice guide they do not understand or care about how modern windows operate and are stuck in pre-XP paradigms.

My choice for data removal? I wrote an article here: 4 pass disk wipe with bad blocks support: http://scforum.info/index.php/topic,8055.msg20407.html#msg20407

Today's offer I'll skip. Besides, Windows offers this too! Even better: it only cleans the freespace of your partition / disk. More info? http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow_viewer/0,3253,l=255104&a=255105&po=8,00.asp

Even CCleaner (which I HATE) can do this: complete wipe OR free space wipe... http://www.piriform.com/docs/ccleaner/using-ccleaner/wiping-free-disk-space

So there you go - Giovanni will no doubt finish my list of with a "few" more tools ; -)

Peace

Devvie


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I'm not installing this. I was curious as to which particular algorithms this software used to wipe, and went to their website in hopes of finding out. When the page loaded, I noticed the link to "user reviews" (5 stars, 10 reviews), and thought I'd check them out. It's not that the reviews are bad, but I believe some -if not all- are fake. Take for example this gem, from our man Scott in Arizona: "Does as advertisement. This software does exactly as it is advertised. I highly recommend it since it completely erase everything." Dudes named Scott who live in Arizona just don't say things like "Does as advertisement", but I'd imagine somebody who would describe the software like this, would: Use Tenorshare Data Wipe to truly do erase the data firstly. It permanently and completely wipes private and confidential data from all hard drive and external storage including your personal data, programs, virus and etc.

It may very well be fine software, but such reviews leave a bad taste in my mouth, and if my first thoughts about your product or your company are to question your integrity, I'm moving right along.

Also, I find it troubling that they've masked their email addresses in the About Us page, replacing @ with #, and telling you to do the inverse if you want to email them. I've never seen that on a software company's page. There are a number of ways to defeat spam, all more professional than that.

- Tracy (doing exactly as advertisement, on the internet in this comment and etc ;)

Wiping or erasing data is different from deleting data in respect to not being able to recover wiped/erased data, while deleted data can be recovered.

This is achived by overwriting data while erasing of wiping. Most welknown method of erasing is 'Gutman' by writing a series of 35 patterns over the region to be erased. Ofcourse this takes time.

There are other methods, overwriting fewer times and other patterns (like all zero's), taking less time.

This tool claims to perform wipe or erase actions but doesn't let you choose how to do it (method). The help-file isn't informative about it either, nore is their website. So what does it do?
You do get a choise of wiping files, folders or partions.

There are less obscure tools doing this, and freeware. When you really care to wipe your data I would prefer to know what I'm doing.
The best ones let you wipe deleted data aswell (this one doesn't).

I will not try this software, but you could test it by trying to recover wiped data by this tool. You could also try some freeware of course, I'm sure Giovanni will come up with loads of it.

My Avast launches every time when trying to use this program, it is thinking it is malware, then it cant find enough evidence and thinks its safe, dont want to change any Avast settings to allow this program to run and then it lets a bad program run, unintaled and wiped the program out with a different secure wiping program, Sorry but I don't trust this at all!!!....