James Bond or Jane Doe will find ShredIt X useful
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Jul 11, 2004 at 11:05pm
Those of us with top-secret documents on our Macs need to shred them, not simply delete them. As for me, I can’t have the memo from Steve Jobs with the picture of the new iMac prototype just floating around for anyone to see. And I’ve got to destroy those incriminating photos of Steve Ballmer after my check comes in (hey, Apple, when did you say those new 30-inch Cinema Displays would be available?). Folks like me need ShredIt X from Mireth Technology. An “eDocument shredder,” it lets you securely and permanently delete files, folders or disk free space.
Why not just toss such items in the trash and delete ‘em? Because doing so doesn’t remove the file contents from the hard disk; it just removes the file name from the directory, leaving the data intact and vulnerable. To securely delete the file contents from the hard disk, the area on the disk where the file contents are stored with other data must be overwritten. That’s ShredIt’s job. It can also securely delete all copies of such files. When you edit a file, the application program will create and delete working copies each time you save, leaving multiple copies of your file on the hard disk in the disk free space area. In order to securely delete these copies, you need to shred your free space.
ShredIt can shred data on the hard drive, an external hard drive, a floppy disk, a Zip disk, windows formatted media, a RAM disk and just about any disk you can attach to your Mac (except read-only disks and CD ROMs). You can shred items already tossed in the trash. ShredIt X offers optional electronic document shredding standards compliance (US DoD, NSA, Gutmann), a configurable overwrite pattern and number of overwrites.
The application has several “fail-safe” features to prevent you from destroying a file you want to keep. There’s a “Safe Place” option that lets you protect data from accidental shredding. You can activate a “Confirm before shred” dialog. These features, like all of ShredIt X, are use to use, thanks to an intuitive interface with “drag and drop” or “select from menu” choices.
Of course, the appeal of the product may be hampered some by the “Secure Empty Trash” feature in Mac OS X. Users who deal with confidential data are concerned primarily with shredding data files and this is the function that the “Secure Empty Trash” feature performs. However, to shred any data already deleted prior to using this feature, you have to shred free space. Also, the work files created by your applications are released to free space periodically (this is application dependent). Shredding your free space on a regular basis will eliminate most of these. Shredit X shreds free space; Panther doesn’t.
As an aside, the work files most people are concerned about are the ones created when they’re on the Internet (i.e. cache files). If you clear your cache, these files are released to free space. To shred these files without having to shred your free space, you can use NetShred. It will shred the cache files each time you quit from your browser.
Users who are disposing of a computer want to shred the entire contents of their drive. Prior to Panther, the only way to do this was to erase the hard drive and then shred it. With Panther, users can now erase a hard drive with the option of an “8 Way Random Write Format”, effectively shredding the drive.
Although these two new features do reduce the need for a third party data shredder, you may still want ShredIt X (which costs US$19.95) because of additional features and convenience not offered by Panther, namely the ability to shred free space, the “Safe place” that protects data from accidental shredding and standards compliance convenience.
Also, ShredIt is more convenient to use than “Secure Empty Trash.” With ShredIt, you drag a file or folder on to the icon, and it’s shredded right away. With Panther, you drag it into the trash and then it’s shredded when you empty to trash.
So even if you don’t carry eyes-only or executive-blackmailing data on your Mac, ShredIt may still be worth the $19.99 price. Evaluate your shredding/security needs and decide based on that.
ShredIt X is a one-trick pony, but sometimes one good trick is all you need.
Macsimum rating: 7 out of 10
Minimum system requirements: Power Mac G3 (or better) and Mac OS X.
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Contributor
Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
