(March 13, 2012 at 1:07 pm)Doubting Thomas Wrote: Like I said, either use reliable file deletion software, or delete the offending material, empty the recycle bin, transfer several GB of innocuous files to your computer to overwrite any empty sectors, defragment, delete the extra files from your computer, defragment again, transfer the several GB of files back to your computer, delete them again, etc. Eventually the data will get overwritten.
This is overkill.
All you need to do is delete your data via a secure deletion method. The de-facto standard would probably be the 7-pass method, which is implemented in numerous deletion programs. I think it's based on Bruce Schneier's algorithm, which writes 1's over all the data, then 0's, and then 5 passes of random values. Good luck getting any data back after that.
Of course, for the uber paranoid, there is the Gutmann method.
