Let’s stick some more with Windows tools. A few years ago it became hip to wow friends and family with tools that would undelete or recover files long through gone from hard disks. This led to the eventual realization that old computers given away and drives lost or stolen could yield a lot of data if not properly wiped. If you ask me, if there is any doubt about a whether a drive’s contents are sensitive or not, just destroy the drive when it is decommission. (Besides, the powerful magnets inside the drives when disassembled make for fun toys for most anyone, if you want to score some points.)
Anyway, FreeUndelete is a tool to recover files. Also, the oldie tool Restoration is still available for the same purpose.
Oh, and PhotoRec is a tool to recover files from flash drives (and I bet other things!). This was described very well in an article on InformIT.
You can use Eraser as a tool to better wipe files from a Windows system. Use it in conjunction with the recovery tools above to see the differences. For full disk wipes, I prefer the bootable DBAN disc.
Of course there are more tools! Here’s a quick list I pulled from a mailing list:
OverWrite
SecureDelete
another Secure Delete
WipeDisk
AutoClave
Wipe (Linux)
and of course, shred for Linux, which should need no link.
I’m not sure if you’ve seen this, but I just noticed that IronGeek has a video on his site demonstrating PhotoRec. Ironic that you you mentioned both videos and undelete utilities recently and I just happen to run across this while looking for another application.
How coincidental! Thanks for pointing me over there. I can’t open IronGeek from work so I’ve gotten just enough of a backlog of IronGeek posts in my RSS reader that I hadn’t seen the PhotoRec one yet.