On 8 May 98 at 10:30, Len Warner wrote: > ***B. a security issue > > If it's for confidentiality (you want to be sure the deleted files > cannot be recovered) you should use a security delete utility ON > THE ORIGINAL FILES that overwrites the physical storage space before > releasing it back to DOS. Just to be sure, you should fill all > space on the affected drive with dummy data. (And if you use Win95, > you did empty the Recycle Bin first, didn't you?) A friend of mine > has a batch command that copies the contents of the MS-DOS > directory repeatedly to fill the disk. Note that in an era of DriveSpace and other compression technologies, a "security delete utility" is very hard to get right; there's no guarantee that the data written back "over" the file contents will be the same *size*, or stored in the same physical disk sectors. Sooner or later, the OS is going to try to re-use the disk space of deleted files, and your friend's approach forces that to happen within a few minutes. That and a defrag should eliminate all trace of the original file data, although its directory entry (minus the first letter) may persist a bit longer. David G