Review: WipeClean v1.0

Over the past month, I’ve been beta testing a new product by Avantrix called WipeClean. This product allows you to securely wipe files from your hard drive by writing zeros overall the bits on the drive. Another great feature that it adds, is if you wipe a folder, it’ll wipe that folders contents and subfolders based on a file mask that you provide. So, by easily supplying *.dat when wiping a folder, only files with that mask will get wiped leaving all other masks in-tact.

One of the biggest features that I enjoy, is the Windows Shell integration. This is an optional executable that runs in your systray that provides right-click context menu availability for wiping files directly from Windows Explorer. An added feature, is this same integration adds support for wiping your Recycle Bin contents.

There is also another great feature called “Wipe Free Space,” that you guessed it, wipes the free space of a hard drive. This is great for zero-ing out all that extra space on your hard drive if your a worry-wort, or just wanted to compress the drive size done (in VPC only).

The only pieces that I didn’t like, which is strung across all their products, is the fact that “Jobs” can be saved, but not on a per user profile basis. It saves your jobs to a directory below the installation directory, which means – you can’t save jobs if your running as Non-Admin. In Avantrix response, though, they state that operations like above should really only be done as an Admin, thus eliminating the possibility of not being able to save the job.

All in all, this is a great product, and I’ve found it extremely useful in securely wiping my files / folders from my hard drive. In work, this is a great thing, especially if you deal with secure documents all day. Check out the WipeClean website and try out their 15–day trial! And for a $19.95 value, you can’t go wrong.