SDelete – A Key to Safely Donating Your PC

As the year draws to a close, charitable institutions and non-profits see a marked increase in donations. For people like me, sometimes those donations include used PCs. How do you make sure your information is secure when donating a PC?

Obviously, you can format the drive. But is that enough? Not really. All that space on your hard drive still contains traces of the original files, meaning it is still possible to recover sensitive information.

Enter SDelete. From SysInternals (whose founder, Mark Russinovich has since joined Microsoft, thus making SysInternals also part of Microsoft), “SDelete implements the Department of Defense clearing and sanitizing standard DOD 5220.22-M, to give you confidence that once deleted with SDelete, your file data is gone forever.”

It’s a command-line utility, meaning you have to open a command window to run it. From the site:

SDelete Usage

SDelete is a command line utility that takes a number of options. In any given use, it allows you to delete one or more files and/or directories, or to cleanse the free space on a logical disk. SDelete accepts wild card characters as part of the directory or file specifier.

Usage: sdelete [-p passes] [-s] [-q]
sdelete [-p passes] -z [drive letter]

-p passes

Specifies number of overwrite passes

-s

Recurse subdirectories

-q

Don’t print errors (quiet)

-z

Cleanse free space

I love SysInternals’ utilities, and I’m currently preparing 2 PCs for donation, so it’s getting a workout!