Roger DeReu: This is the Free Computer Consultant. I'm going to do a little screencast video here today to show you about a great utility which is actually a free software and you can see the URL address right here. The product is called Eraser. What this is going to let us do, really a number of things, but I'm going to concentrate on its relationship to USB flash drives, its little USB thumb drives that we're always putting data on, taking it from place A to place B and replacing the floppy drives with. Now here we have got a USB drive that's opened up here and I am going to show you how it got some old data and some new data on here. Let's just say that we had this at a client location, a lot of professionals do this. We don't realize the risk of the data in an erased format on a USB stick that can be recovered by someone that really doesn't have any right to the data and really it's a lot of liability there.
So, we can take this and we can right click and we can say erase and this doesn't mean just erase, this is the Eraser program and it will erase the data file in a secure manner. You can even check the options here and see how it's going to do that, it's going to really overwrite that space, it's going to use US Department of Defense standards here in addition to some others. We say yes, we want to erase it and this is going to overwrite it and it's going to take a matter of seconds for this small data file. As soon as that's done, I am going to show you how we can move a new data file securely onto say a hard drive and then have it securely erased from the USB stick. Here is the little task completed report close, we right click this file, will go up here to erase your secure move.
Let's just move it to the desktop. Yes, we do want to move it. Again, this doesn't take very long. Of course the larger the size of the file and if you have a slow USB stick, it will take longer. We're going to just close that. So, now we have an empty drive, but let's go ahead and copy that back on here, just copy it there. I want to show you what we can do here to actually erase all of the unused portion of that drive and to create a new task; it's going to be on a removable disk. What we're going to do is wipe the unused space on the drive. We will right click that task and run it. You are about to erase all selected data on the list, but not on the disk, it's just the unused disk space. Yes, we want to continue. This is very small USB stick, it has a slow 1.0, but it still isn't going to take very long because of its size.
Now, I'll show you when we are all done that we still have that data, that one data file that we want will still be on the drive. And there it is; that file is still there. So, here we have it. Again, this is the Eraser, after the version 5.82, it's free software. Here is where you can go to get it. I think that's about it for the screencast. I hope you found that to be useful. This is the Free Computer Consultant. Please go to my website www.freecomputerconsultant.com for other tips, how to videos, a lot of information, free utilities. Thanks for watching.
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