PeaZip is a free cross-platform file archiver that provides an unified portable GUI for many Open Source technologies like 7-Zip, FreeArc, PAQ, UPX...
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Features of PeaZip includes extract, create and convert multiple archives at once, create self-extracting archives, split/join files, strong encryption with two factor authentication, encrypted password manager, secure deletion, find duplicate files, calculate hashes, export job definition as script.

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FAQ: Secure file deletion

Topics: secure delete, secure file deletion program, file shredding, data clearing software, freeware data whiping, data sanitization application, data recovery, file recovery.

How to securely delete files and folders with PeaZip?

"Secure delete" function in context menu and in "File tools" submenu is intended for secure deletion of file and folders (file shredding, or data erasure

).

Pea utility accepts multiple files and/or directories as input and provides multiple overwriting of file data with random data stream (AES256 CTR) forcing flush to disk each time, then replacement of content with randomly sized random data to fake file size, and multiple renaming of the file with random string.

Please use it carefully since securely deleted data will reasonably be not recoverable with known means.

Anyway please note that secure file deletion doesn’t overcome all known risks of data leakage, since may exist copies of the data as temporary files saved by application that accessed the file, or as not securely deleted older version of the file, or cached by the system: clearing a file cannot affect that data, which can be recovered with software utilities or specific hardware probes.

Moreover, flash based storage usually re-allocates sectors for writing transparently for the software, in order to reduce unit’s wear since flash units have a shorter lifespan in terms of writes; this doesn’t allow to efficiently physically overwrite original content, reducing the efficiency of file shredding.

In those cases only erasing the whole disk (with one or more random data passage on all the free space) would be effective, but this can be very time consuming and, for flash based or hybrid drives, it will lead to fast wear and reduced lifespan of devices (disk whiping is currently not implemented PeaZip’s secure file deletion procedure).

As an alternative to secure deletion PeaZip provides a fast deletion menu entry that delete files and folders without moving data to the recycle bin, which is faster and increases security against forgetting of recycled data.

Like secure deletion, fast deletion does not allows to recover data from the system's recycle bin, but as it is not intended for securely sanitizing data, it is feasible to recover data destroyed with fast deletion with appropriate undelete utilities.

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