Shortcomings of Cipher.exe
To wipe off the data from the hard drive, Windows provide an inbuilt utility known as Cipher.exe. This utility overwrites the de-allocated data from the NTFS (New Technology File System) based hard drive.
To prevent misuse of data, people generally use this utility to wipe off their hard drive data at the time of selling or donating the computer system. But Cipher.exe is not considered as an efficient tool as it comes with certain flaws like it is not a user friendly tool, and does not wipe off the data in one go, etc. In such situations, for complete and systematic wipe off of the hard drive data, you need to use a powerful disk wipe software.
For instance - For the safety of your data, you want to wipe off the hard drive data completely. You use Cipher.exe tool to erase the hard drive data. To use this tool, you need to follow the steps below:
Firstly, you need to close all the programs that are running on the computer system.
Then you need to click Start, then click Run, type cmd and press Enter.
After this, you need to type- cipher / w:driveletter:foldername and press Enter. This specifies the folder name in the drive, which you want to overwrite.
After following the above steps, the data from the selected folder gets wiped off completely. But, this utility is not capable of wiping off the hard drive data entirely in one go. In addition, this utility takes a considerable amount of time to complete the whole process. Thus, this tool is not recommended when the need is to wipe off the data completely from the hard drive. In such situations, you need to use a good quality Disk Wipe application to permanently wipe off the hard drive data.
The drive wipe tool effectively overwrites the binary data with 0 and 1 randomly to ensure absolute wipe off of the hard drive data leaving no possibility of data recovery.
Stellar Disk Wipe is an advanced software that completely eradicates the hard drive data in one go. The Drive Wipe utility uses up to 35 passes to completely wipe off the hard drive. The read-only tool provides rich graphical user-interface, that makes it easy to use and understand, so that anyone can use it without facing any difficulty. This application is available for both Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems.