I’ve written a little MS Access application to keep track of certain records, including financial account details, passwords, etc.
Other people might find the application useful, and I wouldn’t mind giving them a copy. But obviously, I don’t want them seeing my personal details. If I delete records from the table, how sure can I be that they are gone completely, and that some clever bastard will not be able to retrieve them?
From the Tools menu select
Database Utilites > Compact and Repair database.
The space taken up by the deleted records will be removed.
Thanks for the info.
Are you certain that this removes ALL deleted records beyond recovery? I just want to be sure.
It de-allocates the memory those records resided in. You will not be able to see these records any more from Access, but that does NOT mean that the information is permanently removed from your hard drive.
I should add an addendum here……
If you intend to actually give someone a copy of the database to use on their own machine, you’re fine. The records in question were never stored on their hard drive so there’s nothing for them to see.
The only way anyone is going to get the information in question is to run some kind of utility on the hard drive the database was on when you entered those records.
If you are super-paranoid about it, open up a new version of Access and import everything from the old version into it. Select table structures ONLY, no data, and you will wind up with a nice, virgin copy of your application.