YOU WILL NEED Windows 10 or 11 TIME REQUIRED: Two hours
Once upon a time, back in the earliest days of personal computing, deleting a file meant it was gone for good. That was the assumption, anyway; then, in 1982, Peter Norton released the UNERASE tool, which could be used to magically restore files that had been wiped using the ERASE command in MS-DOS. Subsequently, Microsoft added its own official UNDELETE command to MS-DOS 5.
For careless computer users these tools were a godsend, but for businesses that had made the early investment in storing sensitive information on computer disks, the idea of undeleting files was an alarming threat to data security. Since then, the threat has only grown: almost all of us have our own personal information stored somewhere in digital form that we wouldn’t want to fall into the wrong hands, while digital storage is now ubiquitous across businesses and governments.
Indeed, various regulations make companies legally liable for ensuring certain types of data are kept secure and confidential, even after a computer is sold, donated or thrown into a skip – so secure deletion is more important than ever.
"For businesses that had made the early investment in storing sensitive information on computer disks, the idea of undeleting files was an alarming threat to data security."
How does secure deletion work?
Undeleting is possible because “deleting” a file doesn’t actually remove its contents from the disk – it merely marks the space it occupied as
