More About What it Does in Detail:

The Cylog website gives the following details:

CyberShredder is a quick, safe and handy utility that lets you erase confidential files from your computer permanently. Normal file deletion will remove a file’s directory entry and allocation table information. The actual disk clusters that contained the file’s data remains intact on your hard disk and can be recovered later. CyberShredder overwrites the space occupied from a file with random data and erases the file, so an unerase utility will never be able to recover it.

CyberShredder’s simple interface will help you get rid of confidential data permanently. It deletes files using three different shredding methods, including the NSA approved seven-pass file deletion method.

Please note that files and directories erased by CyberShredder can not be recovered using an undelete program. Make sure you use it with care. We recommend that you learn how to use the program by testing its behaviour with some test data first.

On running CyberShredder the following screens and menus are provided:

This review will follow the usual format of presenting the majority of information as screenshots backed up by further information where necessary.

(click on any picture to enlarge where necessary)

Main Window

The main window shows a menu bar for File Settings and Help. To start deleting files simply choose the settings you want from the menu then drag and drop a selection of files or folders.

N.B. If you drag and drop more files or folders after the initial drop then is seems that CyberShredder abandons the previous deletion and starts on the new selection. In testing this led to some unexpected behavior. It would seem that the program should prevent accepting any further drag and drop operations until deletion is completed.

When deletion is in progress the following details are displayed. Also note in this screenshot there are 2 separate instances of CyberShredder running with different settings and files. This was a small experiment to overcome the inability of CyberShredder to “add” further files and folders once a delete process had started.

The current operation is displayed in orange near the bottom left of the window. Try experiment to see the different operations depending on the settings chosen.

File menu

This allows shortcuts to be set or to exit the program.

Settings

Some useful settings, particularly the speed (and therefore level of security) The Help File gives the following information:

File Shredding Methods
CyberShredder supports three methods of file shredding. It writes over the contents of the file and past that into the slack area of the hard disk that a file occupies. This makes sure that it will overwrite all hard disk clusters that the file was written to.

After writing over the current file contents several times, the program truncates the file (so the previous size of the file becomes unknown), then it changes the file’s filename to an unreadable one, resets the file’s modification, creation and last access date/time and finally removes the file. There is absolutely no way for a recovery utility to find the file by using (or guessing) its name, size or date/time information. The table below lists the methods CyberShredder supports and highlights the main differences between them.

Very Quick Shred
One-pass writes zeros over the file. Very low security, but quick enough for deleting not very important information.

Quick Shred
A three-pass secure and quick way to delete files. Writes zeros (0), ones (1) and then a random stream of bytes.

Normal Shred
The NSA approved method of file erasure, uses seven-pass file overwriting.

Warning!
Please note that CyberShredder uses low-level Windows API routines, which override the normal way the operating system writes to the disk (cached writes), to make sure that every file write operation goes directly to the hard disk. This removes files in the most secure fashion and renders file recovery impossible.

Help

Provides access to a local html Help file or to the CyLog website as well as providing an update check.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, November 29th, 2008 at 12:53 pm and is filed under Portable Freeware, Windows OS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.