Carnegie Mellon University

Data Sanitization and Disposal Tools 

The following table provides a list of data sanitization tools that are acceptable for Clearing or Purging of data as defined by the ISO Guidelines for Data Sanitization and Disposal.  If there are other tools you'd like ISO to review and include in this, please send your request to iso@andrew.cmu.edu.

File and Folder Sanitization

Tool  MAC

UNIX/
Linux

Windows  Description
Link
BCWipe  X
X
X
Fee based utility for securely deleting files and sanitizing hard drives.  More...
Dell Data Wipe         X Dell Data Wipe is a feature in Dell Enterprise Client BIOS that gives customers the ability to invoke a data wipe of the internal storage devices in their system. More...
Eraser     
X
Free GUI based utility for securely deleting files and sanitizing hard drives.  More...
Identity Finder
X
Identity Finder is a commercial application licensed by the University to scan for sensitive data that is stored electronically. This application has the ability to securely delete files.  More...
Microsoft SDelete    
X
Free command line utility for securely deleting files.  This tool was previously part of the SysInternals suite of tools.  More...
Secure Empty Trash 
X
    Built-in functionality for securely deleting files (OSX 10.4 or later). N/A
SRM   
X
  Free command line utility for securely deleting files.  Acts as a replacement for the rm command.  More...

Disk Sanitization

Tool  MAC UNIX/
Linux 
Windows  Description
Link
BCWipe Total WipeOut X X BCWipe Total WipeOut is a powerful utility designed to wipe content of an entire hard drive including partition tables, boot records, and filesystem structures. More... Download
Darik's Boot and Nuke ("DBAN")  
X
X
Free open source utility for sanitizing hard drives.  A commercial version of this software is also available.  More... Download
Parted Magic  
X
X
A complete hard disk management solution. More... Download