Tucows names ShredIt "The Head of the Herd"
December 1999

Look around any office today and one of the standard pieces of equipment is the paper shredder. Paper shredders are even becoming popular at home and for a good reason. Just one little bit of information gleamed from your garbage can give people access to your bank accounts and credit cards.

But what about your computer? Most people don't even think twice about information on their hard drives. Even if you throw something into the Mac's trash can and empty it anyone with a little bit of computer savvy can recover those files.

Information doesn't get deleted from your Mac's hard drive until another file over writes it. That can be the next day or even two months from the day that you empty the trash.

If you want to permanently get rid of a document or file from your hard drive you need to wipe the data completely off of the drive. That's where a utility called ShredIt can come in handy.

Dropping a file or folder onto ShredIt icon will permanently remove it from the hard drive. We mean permanently, as in it gone forever, so be sure that you never want to see the file again.

Another nice feature of ShredIt is that it will wipe out the free space on your hard drive so that old files and information residing there cannot be recovered. This is especially important if you send e-mail that you would like to keep private. Even if you delete an e-mail from your mail program that information is probably still written on your hard drive until another file over writes it.

We recently recovered a crashed hard drive from an old Performa using a standard disc utility. The Performa's owner was shocked to see the files that we were able to pull up. Files that were tossed out months ago were recovered and still readable.

ShredIt can be configured to warn you before sending your data to oblivion. We keep ShredIt's icon on the other side of the screen from the Mac's trash can. So there is no mistaking what file gets shredded. All in all for a $10 (sic) shareware investment ShredIt will keep your Mac a more secure.