Data eraser privacy ratings
Tools that securely delete files and wipe drives.
8 data erasers are rated against 4 public criteria, and 8 have enough evidence for a letter grade. Of the 2 with a known jurisdiction, 1 is based in a Five Eyes country, and 2 in the wider Fourteen Eyes.
Open-source data erasers only · Criteria for this category · Suggest an addition · Markdown
| Name | Grade | Score | Data | Jurisdiction | Open source | No trackers or telemetry | No ads or data sales | Independent audit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Windows tool that removes sensitive data from a hard drive by overwriting it several times with selected patterns. |
Grade B | 80 | 100% | – | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
Command-line disk eraser for Linux written in C, with a text-based interface. It is a fork of the dwipe engine from DBAN and is used by ShredOS. |
Grade B | 80 | 100% | – | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
Command-line tool that securely removes files, directories and whole disks by overwriting them, for Linux, BSD, macOS and Windows. It has not been updated for several years. |
Grade B | 80 | 100% | – | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
A CLI utility that overwrites files and devices so their contents are difficult to recover. |
Grade B | 80 | 100% | – | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
Darik's Boot and Nuke is a bootable disk image that wipes hard disk drives. It is owned by Blancco, has not been developed since its last release, and does not support SSDs. |
Grade D | 50 | 100% | – | Yes | No | Yes | No |
Portable Windows tool that securely erases files, folders and drives, with extra tools to analyse drives and remove leftover file system traces. |
Grade D | 50 | 100% | Germany Fourteen Eyes | No | Yes | Yes | No |
Microsoft Sysinternals command-line tool for Windows that securely deletes files and cleans free disk space by overwriting data. |
Grade F | 35 | 100% | United States Five Eyes | No | Partial | Yes | No |
Wondershare Dr.Fone, a closed-source desktop toolkit for Android and iOS devices whose data eraser wipes a phone connected to a computer. |
Grade F | 0 | 100% | – | No | No | No | No |
Questions
What is the most private option among data erasers?
No pick has been made yet. The table above is sorted by score, based on public evidence.
How are data erasers rated?
Each entry answers 4 questions: open source, no trackers or telemetry, no ads or data sales and independent audit. Answers need links to evidence. See the full criteria.
Does jurisdiction matter?
Jurisdiction decides which laws can compel a provider to hand over data. Each entry shows its country and whether it is in the Five, Nine or Fourteen Eyes. The data a provider can hand over depends mostly on what it stores and who holds the keys. Read about jurisdictions and the CLOUD Act.