Files Terminator Free Portable

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on February 28, 2012

When you delete files and folders in Windows, they're not really gone. To make sure something you want to delete has been wiped from your system, you need something stronger. Files Terminator Free Portable securely deletes files and folders and recovers free space in your disk drives. It's completely portable, so you can save it to a USB drive or similar device and run it on any compatible machine.

Files Terminator has a small but colorful interface that you might mistake for a pop-up ad if you only glance at it. A drop-down menu offers 9 different methods for overwriting and destroying data, from a fast Pseudorandom method to powerful seven-step methods. The 35-step Peter Gutmann method is included but is listed as Not Recommended. The program recommends the Random one-step method for most uses. This method overwrites deleted items with random data and is sufficient for most files. Files Terminator's options are limited to a choice of languages, though you can add a language if you need one that isn't listed. The interface has three buttons: Destroy Files(s), Destroy Folder, and Destroy Free space. The Free Space tool includes a drop-down list of all our disk drives and a shutdown check box.

Files Terminator is totally easy to use. We clicked Destroy File(s) and browsed to a target file. A pop-up advised us the data would be unrecoverable if we proceeded. We clicked OK, and another pop-up notified us the data had been wiped from existence. The Destroy Folder feature is basically identical, though for some reason the file browser pop-ups are different in appearance if not function. The disk space tool advised us to turn off file compression and indexing on the target disk and not to use the computer while it worked. We used it on an archive disk instead of our C drive. The documentation mentions drag-and-drop support, but that feature didn't work. We could open multiple instances of Files Terminator. Files Terminator Free Portable offers multiple choices for effectively and permanently destroying data.