Before you donate or sell any used computers you have for home or business, you want to be sure to use a file shredder on the hard drives of that computer. A file shredder program wipes clean all of the information stored on your PC’s internal hard drive. You might think that deleting files does this and you should know that it simply does not.
The process of deleting a file merely removes the file name allowing new information to write to that area. Beyond situations where you might be donating or selling a computer filled with private information there are plenty of other instances where you may wish to delete files forever. Financial and medical records that you may wish to keep private need to be protected. Personal emails of which a copy might exist in your sent mail folder have to be eradicated in such a manner as no one could ever connect you to that message. Very often we have a situation where we need to maintain a high level of security for emails and other file storage. This is precisely the purpose for which file shredder programs were created.