Eraser 5.7 from Network
Chico
You can now download Eraser 5.7
(2746K) directly from Network Chico
computer and network
consulting services.
Simply click on the download
button and save the software to your computer. If you download
this software please consider joining the Network
Chico mailing
list. Thank you.
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.
Eraser 5.7 works with Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP and
DOS.
Eraser is FREE software
and its source code is released under GNU General Public License.
The patterns used for overwriting are based on Peter Gutmann's
paper "Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State
Memory" and they are selected to effectively remove magnetic
remnants from the hard drive.
Other methods include the one defined in the National Industrial
Security Program Operating Manual of the US Department of Defence
and overwriting with pseudorandom data. You can also define your
own overwriting methods.
Top reviews from the most popular software sites and magazines
confirm that Eraser is one of the best security tools available
for Windows.
Your first thought may be that when you delete the file, the
data is gone. Not quite. When you delete a file the operating
system does not really remove the file from the disk; it only
removes the reference of the file from the file system table.
The file remains on the disk until another file is created over
it, and even after that, it might be possible to recover data
by studying the magnetic fields on the disk platter surface.
Before the file is overwritten, anyone can easily retrieve
it with a disk maintenance or an undelete utility.
There are several problems in secure file removal, mostly
caused by the use of write cache, construction of the hard disk
and the use of data encoding. These problems have been taken
into consideration when Eraser was designed, and because of this
intuitive design and a simple user interface, you can safely
and easily erase private data from your hard drive.
Most people have some data that they would rather not share
with others - passwords, personal information, classified documents
from work, financial records, self-written poems, the list can
be continued forever.
Perhaps you have saved some of this information on your computer
where it is conveniently at your reach, but when the time comes
to remove the data from your hard disk, things get a bit more
complicated and maintaining your privacy is not as simple as
it may have seemed at first.
If you have an older version of Eraser installed on your system,
make sure you uninstall it before installing the latest version.
If the uninstaller asks you to restart the computer, do it immediately.
Uncompress the archive "Eraser57Setup.zip"
into a temporary directory (you will need an application like
FreeZip for this).
Install Eraser by double clicking on the windows installer
file "EraserSetup.exe." The archive contains a digital
signature for the setup program so you can verify its authenticity.
After the installation is completed you can remove the setup
files. Eraser 5.7 is now installed.
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