The data saved to your hard drive remains on the drive after deleting or sending the data to the Recycle Bin. When you delete a file, the operating system no longer has access to the data, but the actual information has not been removed. When files are deleted from your hard drive, you can retrieve them using data recovery software. This is good for files that you want to recover, but bad if you need to completely erase data from your computer.
Shredder offers different methods to erase your data. Each method overwrites data with different patterns in a series of write passes. Your data is more thoroughly erased with each pass. However, multiple passes take more time.
The default number of passes is 1, but you can increase the number passes in Settings. For more information, see Editing Shredder Settings.
Note: To erase all of the data on a drive or partition, use Secure Erase, available on the program CD.
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