We delete items everyday, and then we empty the Recycle Bin and the data is never to be seen again. Well that sounds good, there are a number of tools that can recover this "deleted" data. When you delete a file it is not actually deleted from the hard drive, it is marked for deletion and allowed to be overwritten with new data.

Windows 2000, XP and 2003 all include a tool, Cipher.exe, which we can use to wipe all data the has been marked for deletion from the hard drive. Cipher.exe is a pretty powerful tool, type the following to see a listing of all its features. Cipher.exe /? The switch we are interested in is the /w switch. /W - Removes data from available unused disk space on the entire volume. If this option is chosen, all other options are ignored. The directory specified can be anywhere in a local volume. If it is a mount point or points to a directory in another volume, the data on that volume will be removed. In order to wipe any data marked for deletion we need to run the following command. cipher.exe /w We can also specify a folder with the following command.

cipher.exe /w:D:\Test

Once the process is complete, any deleted data on the drive/folder will be overwritten with a pass of all 0's, then all 1's and finally a sequence of random numbers. This will completely remove any data that may have been marked for deletion but not yet overwritten or removed.