You can backup files to external hard drive for better safety and portability. Be sure to backup anything you don’t want to lose on the hard drive, they will be deleted permanently after cleaning.Thus the erased data can hardly be recovered and your sensitive info will stay safe. They are mostly based on zero-filling, which implements disk wipe by writing zeros to hard drive.

Therefore, I’d like to provide 4 secure ways. You can still retrieve it by recovery tools until the data is actually overwritten. Because when you delete a file or a folder from the hard drive, it’s just marked as deleted, not fully erased. If you are trying to clean a hard drive completely and make the data unrecoverable, manual deletion is not a secure way. How to completely wipe a hard drive in Windows 10

In this case, you could perform disk cleanup to speed up the computer. If your computer is running out of space, you can hardly use it smoothly or even fail to perform ordinary operations.

▶ 2 Clean up a hard drive and free up disk space And since it cannot be done by manual deletion, you need to take some powerful disk wipe initiatives. This demand usually arises when you want to discard, sell a device, or use a second-hand disk without worry.

It equals to wipe a hard drive, or permanently delete everything off the hard drive. You can refer to the following and click on the anchor text to jump to the corresponding solutions. There are two common contexts for hard drive cleaning in Windows 10. 2 scenarios to clean a hard drive in Windows 10

How to clear a computer hard drive