Micro Mart

July 19, 2007

by Aaron Birch

Acronis® DriveCleanser® 6.0

Ensure your data remains private by securety deleting it

With personal information so sensitive these days, and with the everincreasing threat of identity theft seemingly around every corner, online or otherwise, making sure your private data remains safe is a very real concern. We all take time to shred sensitive paperwork that contains our narres, addresses and other personal info, and no selfrespecting PC owner would use a PC without some form of security software installed to prevent unauthorised access. But what about disposing of an old PC or hard disk? If you've used computers for a few years, the odds are you'll have been through at least one or two hard drives or PCs in that time. What did you do when you got rid of them? Throw them out? Donate them to a charity shop or relative? Offload them at a car boot sale? If the answer is' yes to any of these, did you consider that your data could be recovered, even from a formatted volume? Well, yes it can. That is, unless you securely delete the data with special software. Enter Acronis® DriveCleanser® 6.0, a secure data deletion tool that has been created solely to make sure your private information doesn't fall into the wrong hands.

Acronis® DriveCleanser® 6.0 isn't actually a full blown program, with its own GUI and ranges of options. Instead, it takes the form of a simple wizard that guides you through the steps of the secure deletion process. On running the program, and the obligatory welcome/information screen, you are asked to choose the drive to be securely erased. All drives currently connected to the machine are listed, including removable media, such as USB sticks, memory cards and so on.

You click a drive (or partition on the drive) to select it and then proceed to the next step. Here you need to choose the action to perform, be it a straight format or to detete the selected partition from the partition table. The next step lets you choose the data destruction method, of which there are quite a few available. Some are quick methods, for those in a hurry, and others are the kind used by the military to destroy sensitive information (insert your own WMD joke here). Each choice will give you a brief description of what it does and the method used to ensure your data deletion. When you're ready to continue, the program will then perform its magic, and the wiping session will begin. Afterwards, you'll get a detaited report on the process, to let you know that your data has been forcefully eradicated.

For the newcomer to PCs who is more than a little security-conscious, and doesn't have the expertise to use more in-depth tools, Acronis® DriveCleanser® 6.0 is a welcome title. Its hand-holding interface and simplistic nature make it a perfect tool for the less advanced user, and the results are great. It also supports practicalty every OS you can think of, including oldies like DOS, and alternatives tike Linux. But, as is always the case, more advanced and business users will want a tool with far more settings and user options, so will need to look elsewhere.