Erasing data is an important aspect of computer privacy. For most, there are two steps involved in deleting a file. The first step involves placing a file into the Recycle Bin. This is an intermediate step in the deletion process, and you can easily take the file out of the Recycle Bin if you do not intend on removing it. The second step which is also the last step, one might think,  is emptying the Recycle Bin. But the data from your computer is not actually erased. Unless the data is replaced, or overwritten, with other data, only will the data be permanently deleted.

You might think that once the Recycle Bin have been emptied, the data can never be retrieved. This maybe be true to some extend that it’s much harder to recover files when they have been emptied in the Recycle Bin, however it is still possible to recover these files, and there are many software packages dedicated to recovering files that have been deleted.

The reason for this is that deleting something only removes its record from the index, or catalog of files. In order to keep track of where all of your data is on disk, your computer creates an index of where the data is written. Instead of looking through the whole disk to find one file, the computer only has to look up its location in the index. Thus, it is much quicker to reference the index before attempting to retrieve data. So, when you delete a file, your computer actually only removes the entry for that file in the index, rather than erasing the data at that specific location.

The trickiest part of file deletion involves clearing the data that is stored at Index.dat file. Index.dat is a file used by Microsoft Internet Explorer to store web addresses, search queries, and recently opened files. This special file houses a record of your cookies, history, temporary files and cache. The dangerous part of this file is when the AutoComplete feature is activated, websites, form entries, and recent download information are stored within this file so that they can be access more easily in the future.

The index.dat file is referenced when you type a website into the address bar, or enter information into a textbox. Most of you have probably encountered a situation where you will be presented with matching entries when you were entering a similar string of characters at any point in the past. While this is useful when dealing with long Internet addresses that are difficult to remember, or repeatedly entering the same information into textboxes, having a complete record of Internet activity is a threat to personal privacy and security. All cookies, history and cache can separately be deleted, but a record of them would still exist in the index.dat file. The worst part is, because of the way Windows is designed; this file cannot be manually deleted and it is hidden deep within your system settings folder. Finding the file is a difficult task let alone attempting to erasing the data stored in it.

If you are lucky and manage to locate the file, and attempt to delete it, they will come up against an error claiming the file is in use. Because it is a system file, and is loaded when the operating system boots, the file is always being used. As such, it is very difficult to manually remove this potential threat to your privacy.

How to permanently Erase Files and deal with the data that is stored in the index.dat?

ParetoLogic Privacy Control is a program that was designed for the purpose of managing and securely deleting any private data on your computer before an authorized user can gain access to it.

Dealing with index.dat is a snap with ParetoLogic Privacy Control. It will locate the locked index.dat file and permanently delete all information contained on it. Since it is impossible to delete the index.dat while it is running, ParetoLogic Privacy Control schedules the index.dat file to be deleted during the next start up of your computer.

In addition to deleting the index.dat file, ParetoLogic Privacy Control permanently deletes all your online history and more. With ParetoLogic Privacy Control’s easy-to-use Advance Shred, permanently erasing any file is a really a piece of cake.

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