Select Shred Files, Shred Folders, or Wipe Free Space to run an operation immediately. You can also shred individuals files and folders and wipe partitions from BleachBit’s File menu. As you’d expect, this option is very slow – so BleachBit warns you. If you have a different partition mounted at /partition, you’ll need to add a folder inside /partition to this list.Īfter configuring the options on the Drives tab, enable the Free disk space option under System. If you only have a single drive, the default settings will work fine. To enable this feature, use the Drives tab in the Preferences window to add a writable folder on each partition on your system. This overwrites deleted files that are lurking in the free disk space, ensuring files deleted by other applications are overwriten. Like CCleaner, BleachBit includes an option to overwrite free disk space with useless data. The downside is that overwriting files is significantly slower than just marking them as deleted, which is why operating systems don’t overwrite all deleted files in the first place. The files may still be recoverable if a copy of them existed elsewhere on the system and that copy wasn’t overwritten, so there’s no guarantee that the data will be completley unrecoverable if you overwrite it – nevertheless, if you’re worried about file-recovery utilities, this is a helpful feature. The overwrite option overwrites the files with useless data, preventing recovery. Programs normally delete files by marking them as deleted, leaving them on the disk for file-recovery utilities to potentially recover. This is equivalent to “shredding” files, as some programs refer to it.

Instead of deleting files normally, you can go into BleachBit’s preferences window (Edit –> Preferences) and enable the Overwrite files to hide contents option. Verify that Bleachbit isn’t deleting any important files you want to keep. You should run a preview by clicking the Preview button before running an actual Clean operation.

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