Back up your data in case you run into a problem and don’t want to lose it.It’s pretty laborious to use Eraser to wipe your entire hard drive this software works best for deleting on a schedule or only deleting certain files/info. Eraser can’t wipe the drive that Windows is installed to because it has to be installed on your computer to work. Eraser is built to work with Windows-based PCs, but you can’t use it on a Mac. As long as the drive works with Windows, Eraser will work with the drive. It’s able to erase data on a schedule, and it erases SSDs and mechanical drives. Eraser supports deleting files, folders, and whole drives. Eraser is free software and its source code is released under GNU General Public License. RELATED: How to choose the right cloud backup serviceĮraser is currently supported under Windows XP (with Service Pack 3), Windows Server 2003 (with Service Pack 2), Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, 8, 10 and Windows Server 2012, 2016. It allows you to completely remove sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns. This advanced security tool is available for Windows-based computers. EraserĮraser is one of the ways you can completely wipe your hard drive clean of all of your personal information - passwords, personal information, classified documents from work, financial records, and other private data. Let’s take a look at a few of the options available for erasing your hard drive. Several options are available to help you erase your hard drive, but some programs are better than others, as with everything. The easiest way is to use software specifically for this purpose. How to erase your hard driveĮrasing your hard drive isn’t as simple of a process as reformatting it. So, if you’re trying to clear your information from your computer completely, you probably need to skip the reformatting and go straight to erasing your hard drive. If you erase your hard drive, though, you can rest assured that your personal information is no easily recoverable by a program or someone with high-level computer knowledge. This can be an issue if you’ve donated or sold your machine to someone else who has an interest in recovering your personal information. You may also like: How to boost your Wi-Fi for good

Anyone with knowledge of how to recover that information - or even someone using a program like RecoverMyFiles - may be able to recover that data from the reformatted hard drive. That basically means that not all information will be cleaned out of your computer by reformatting it, and there will be traces leftover.

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