Active@ ZDelete

If you are selling or donating your old hard drives and want to make sure that nobody can recover any private data from them, you might want to look after a file shredder before handing them to their new owners. File shredders mash up a drive's contents before erasing them, making the recovery process way harder, or even impossible. Active@ ZDelete is a compact shredder that sports a good number of erasing methods, and it might be worth checking it out.

The compact UI provides you with three options that can be used to wipe different types of data (files, folders, drives). A short toolbar is also available, and besides the main actions, it provides access to the settings panel and an activity log.

On the downside, the application does not support the drag and drop feature, which is advertised on the developer's site. This feature would have simplified the entire process, especially from a time-saving point of view. However, the lack of a drag and drop function does not impact the file shredding, so it is not a critical issue.

The default erase method is One Pass Zeros, and if you don't want to use this for all your files, you should take a look at the Settings tab. Two combo menus can be used for method selection, but one targets the files/folders part of the process while the other deals with the hard drives.

As for the available methods, besides the default one, you can opt for US DoD 5220.22-M Canadian OPS-II, Russian GOST p50739-95, etc, — some of which are still in use by governments around the world.

Taking some extra steps to ensure that your data is not recovered and exposed before you give your drives to somebody else might worth the effort. Active@ ZDelete looks like a capable application regarding the methods it provides for file shredding, but at the same time, it would be great if, in the future, we'll see that drag and drop feature added.