If you ever wanted to fully wipe your hard drive when you are about to sell or give your personal computer to your friend or colleague, then you should read this article for you to know the techniques designed to completely wipe your private data or files from your personal computer.
As you all know when you delete files from your personal computer that you have completely ruined the stored data on the hard drive of your system, whether you are using operating systems such as Ubuntu Linux, Windows, or any other similar programs.
However, that’s not the case in the first place. Take note that the operating system you are using doesn’t have features to overwrite the data you have deleted, even though you have actually overwritten the file that makes it not recoverable. But the truth is, your hard drive still has the data and only the right kind of software will make it possible to retrieve it. For completely deleting your stored files, you have to be sure that your entire hard drive and even the hidden files are all wiped out.
Now for shredding files individually, note that on your hard drive your stored data is not going to bring any harm to your system and will not expose your private information. You can use the utility specially designed for Ubuntu Linux called Shred to make it easy for you to dispose of or destroy files that you don’t like to share with anyone else.
At the screen’s top-left portion, the Applications menu should be clicked for a terminal window to be opened and then as you see the Accessories menu expanded, the Terminal should be clicked.
You can use cd for navigating the file that you intend to delete for directory changing, and in the current directory, if you want to list folders and files, ls is the one to use.
If you want to securely delete the file, you may enter on your terminal window the following command parameters: shred or if the filename you have is Personaldata.txt, then it should be like this: shred Personaldata.txt.
From there you can see that the filename still remains even after the shredding process is completed. Now, to completely delete files on your hard drive using shred, command-line arguments can be used. You must be very cautious using the process of file shredding because if you overdo it the original file will totally gone.