Disk Doctors Data Sanitizer work not only by unlinking a file but also specifically overwriting them with garbage data. For very high security installations, overwiting the file several times is advised. Many government institutions have specific disk wiping standards for file deletion. Particularly, the U.S. DoD specification 5220.22 standard says a file must be overwritten three times.

Disk wiping is beneficial for privacy, because files are not completely deleted using operating system's default delete function. In most of the file systems, delete function consists of marking the space occupied by the file as free and updating file system allocation structures, leaving actual file contents intact on the storage media.