If you think you’ve safely deleted a sensitive file from the face of your hard drive to complete oblivion, guess again. Simply sending it to your Recycle Bin and emptying it isn’t enough. That simple maneuver merely masks it from your OS. But still in your hard drive, are bits and pieces of data of the same file waiting to be unmasked. Given the right tools, a person can still “undelete” your files (Like if you’re in the office and have a snooty network admin).

The only way you can delete a file and make it unrecoverable is to delete it and overwrite it multiple times. And Windows doesn’t let you do just that. Good thing for paranoid users, there’s Eraser.

Eraser’s a freeware app that lets you delete securely delete files to make them unrecoverable. It offers different multiple delete-overwrite modes to hack away at the file’s data in your computer. It even features the same processes like those used by the US Department of Defense. Much like beating documents to the pulp instead of merely shredding them.

Eraser integrates its features with your right-click menu and your Recycle Bin for ease of use.

Dowload Eraser here. It works from Windows 95 to XP.