DownloadWipeFreeSpace is a program to securely erase/wipe/overwrite/shred the free space on file systems WITHOUT DESTROYING EXISTING FILES, to prevent recovery of deleted sensitive data.
This allows protecting the user's privacy when e.g. selling the drive or the whole computer.
The following filesystems are supported:
- Ext2/3/4,
- NTFS,
- XFS,
- ReiserFSv3/4,
- FAT12/16/32,
- MinixFS1/2,
- JFS,
- HFS/HFS+,
- OCFS.
The following wiping methods are supported: Gutmann-like, random, Schneier, DoD.
Additionally, WipeFreeSpace can finalize wiping the filesystem by writing blocks of zeros, which is friendly for sparse files, virtual systems and other places where zeroed-out space is not physically allocated.
See the project homepage https://wipefreespace.sourceforge.io and the project Wiki in the menu above.
To prevent clear-text data from being left on the drive in the first place, you can use LibSecRm (https://libsecrm.sourceforge.io), which wipes the data on-the-fly.
Features
- Wipes the free space (unused sectors/blocks/clusters)
- Wipes the slack space (free space in partially-used blocks/clusters)
- Wipes deleted files' metadata (e.g. names)
- Supports many filesystem types
- Is NOT impacted by the filesystem's maximum file size
- Supports many wiping methods
- Writes directly to filesystem blocks instead of creating new files
- Does NOT decrease the free space while working
- Can finalize wiping by writing zeros, good for virtual/sparse devices
- Has command-line and graphical interfaces
- Written with security and portability in mind
- Compiles on Linux, FreeBSD and macOS
Project Samples
