The videographer for my wedding has given me 3 sets of DVD but I wanted more than that which is the original video files that is imported from his camcorder. Although DVDs has very good quality but it’s still not as clear as the original video files. The video guy told me that the videos are in AVI format and takes up 100GB. The only way I can get him to transfer the AVI files to me is to lend him my external hard drive and then collect it the next day when he’s done copying.

I have an external 5.25″ 7200RPM USB/Firewire hard drive which I can pass it to him to copy but before doing that, it is important that I wipe out whatever is in there to prevent from being recovered. If you didn’t know, when a file is deleted from your computer even when after emptying the recycle bin, the file can still be recovered using data recovery software. This hard drive used to be my backup hard drive and it contained a lot of important stuff that is worth keeping. Leaving my hard drive to a stranger for the whole day is definitely dangerous. Here’s what I used to securely wipe out my hard drive.

I’d used Darik’s Boot And Nuke (DBAN) but since it is a boot disk and I didn’t want to go through the trouble of loading the correct drivers my external firewire hard drive, I prefer something simple and portable that can be ran on Windows. I found WipeDisk and Eraser which both are portable and very easy to use. WipeDisk looked easier than Eraser so I gave it a try. After running WipeDisk for about 30 minutes, the WipeDisk program hung and there’s no way for me to terminate the program. I had press the power button for 5 seconds on my laptop to turn off the computer and then turn it back on.

I immediately deleted WipeDisk from my computer and then tried Eraser. Eraser is an advanced security tool for Windows which allows you to completely remove sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns. Works with Windows 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Server 2008.

All I need to do is run Eraser, go to File > New Task and add the external hard drive. Right click on the drive that’s added in Eraser and select Run. It took about 170 minutes to wipe out my 200GB hard drive which is a bit long but you can set Eraser to sleep or shutdown your computer when finished.
Eraser secure delete files

Make sure you always wipe your disk first before lending your external hard drive, usb flash drive, camera memory card to your friend or when you want to throw or donate the drive away.

[ Download Eraser ]

[tags]delete, erase, wipe, eraser, security[/tags]