The CBL Data Shredder program enables you to define your own method to erase a drive. These are discussed in the following section: It must be noted that some features of modern drives may make some areas of the disk inaccessible, even though they may have contained data in the past, and that these areas would continue to be vulnerable to hardware-based recovery. Certain of the erase methods available in the CBL Data Shredder program have particular characteristics that make them suitable for this task. More secure methods of erasing hard drives write more complicated or random bit patterns to the drive several times to effectively frustrate hardware recovery attempts.

Wiping the disk with a simple (non-random) pattern once is known as clearing or erasing and it may still be possible, with specialized hardware and software, to extract data off the disk. The CBL Data Shredder program works by overwriting the entire disk with a pattern of bits. In general it would be true to say that each time a hard drive is overwritten, the chances of recovering any data from it become vanishingly small. The CBL Data Shredder program supports a range of methods of erasing data, providing different levels of security and convenience. When used in accordance with the instructions in this guide, the CBL Data Shredder program will do what file deletion and partition formatting cannot: erase the entire contents of a treated hard drive, rendering them irretrievable to existing and future software-based recovery tools. This situation is made worse by the availability of off-the-shelf products that will automate the recovery process in some cases.

Our experience is that files thought to have been deleted years previously, containing personal details, bank account details, credit card numbers, correspondence, etc., can be recovered all too easily, and simply formatting the drive is not an effective means of rendering this data inaccessible.

The CBL Data Shredder is intended to eliminate the chance that information stored on your hard drive may be retrieved by anyone when it, or the computer containing it, is disposed of.

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