How secure is Drive Wipe?

I would like to know how securely the Drive Wiper wipes files?

I know it has different levels (DOD, NSA, etc) of wiping but truely how good is the program ultimately at making sure files -cannot- be recovered?

Secure Erase is the industry "hot shot" of wipe programs (or was) for example. And they swear there is absolutely no recovery from that.

Thanks for your time!

This question has been asked - and answered - many times. So, once more..

I can find no evidence or claim from law authorities, disk manufacturers, data recovery establishments, etc. that any data can be recovered after being overwritten just once.

However if you phrased the question 'Can data from a file be reconstructed after it has been overwritten?' the answer changes to quite likely. Although the last version of the data is lost forever, there are almost certainly traces left in the pagefile, hiberfile, logfile, prefetch defrags, user defrags, edit copies, cluster tails, bad sectors, sector rewrites, etc. Some of this is easily obtainable, some more difficult. And of course your ISP has a log of every web page you've looked at which has to be kept for a year in the UK I think. By the way you can't securely overwrite data on an SSD.

I can find no evidence or claim from law authorities, disk manufacturers, data recovery establishments, etc. that any data can be recovered after being overwritten just once.

However if you phrased the question 'Can data from a file be reconstructed after it has been overwritten?' the answer changes to quite likely. Although the last version of the data is lost forever, there are almost certainly traces left in the pagefile, hiberfile, logfile, prefetch defrags, user defrags, edit copies, cluster tails, bad sectors, sector rewrites, etc. Some of this is easily obtainable, some more difficult. And of course your ISP has a log of every web page you've looked at which has to be kept for a year in the UK I think. By the way you can't securely overwrite data on an SSD.

While the above is very true, if you truly want your data gone, the best way to ensure it all gets erased is to:

- Backup all your important things to another drive.

- Install Windows to a new harddisk.

- Format the old drive, & wipe the entire drive.

That should take care of the problem.

On a SSD, all data is gone forever when you delete it (if your OS or drivers support the TRIM command, that is) ;)