When you delete a file from your computer, it’s not really gone. In fact, it can often be recovered with the right tools. That’s where Sdelete comes in.

Sdelete is short for Secure Delete and it permanently wipes files by overwriting them–sometimes multiple times, which makes recovery virtually impossible. This tool is part of the Sysinternals suite from Mark Russinovich, which now belongs to Microsoft. It works according to the Clearing and Sanitizing standard DOD 5220.22-M of the US Department of Defense.

This is how it works via the command line: The tool comes in a zip archive and offers the command sdelete after unpacking. For this command to work in the Windows command prompt in any directory, it must be located in a folder that is part of the Windows path variable Path.

The easiest way is to copy the contents of the archive to the folder C:\Windows. Now call up the command prompt by pressing the key combination Win-R and entering cmd. This action starts the command prompt, in which you enter the command sdelete to delete files or folders.

IDG

For example, if you want to delete the file “Document1.docx, enter the following:

Please replace [path] with the location of the file, including the drive letter, such as N:\files. The -p 3 indicates the number of overwrites. In this case, there are three. If you want to delete a folder, including all subfolders and files contained in it, such as the Temp folder, specify your parameters as follows: