Shred For Mac

Deleting items does not mean that the information is instantly removed from your drive: the portions are only marked as free space which means that the system will start rewriting them as you store new data.

As a result, data recovery tools can be employed to get back the information even after deletion. To bypass this issue, you need to both securely erase the files and folders and rewrite the free space with random data.

Shred is a minimalist Java based application that offers you the possibility to deal with securely erasing information in no time. Naturally, you must make sure the Java Runtime is already deployed on your system.

The best part is that Shred is able to launch separate instances, which means that you can perform multiple tasks at the same time: you can shred the free space on a volume, and securely erase different files and folders by using a separate instance.

Take into account that Shred has the same privileges as the current user, which means that you cannot use the tool to shred system folders.

To start using the Shred app, you need to drag and drop the files and folder you want to remove on top of the app’s main window. You get to see the path to each item, together with its size when dealing with individual files.

On the other hand, Shred detects the volumes currently connected to your system and enables you to select the one for which you want to delete the free space from a simple drop-down menu.

All you have to do next is select the number of passes that Shred should use to ensure the data is completely randomized before deleting the items.

Besides overwriting the storage space with random data, Shred will also rename files and folders and make date and time changes to make things even more complicated and the data harder to recover.

Securely erasing drives or devices before selling them is highly recommended considering that there are multiple recovery tools out there that can deliver access to the files that have only been marked for deletion.

Shred offers you the possibility to deal with the task in a streamlined manner, can handle both files and folders, overwrites metadata information, and also integrates scheduling capabilities for the free space erasing function.