Leaving no traces of plaintext on the disk After PGP makes a ciphertext file for you, you can have PGP automatically overwrite the plaintext file and delete it, leaving no trace of plaintext on the disk so that no one can recover it later using a disk block scanning utility. This is useful if the plaintext file contains sensitive information that you don't want to keep around. This example creates the ciphertext file message.pgp , and the plaintext file message.txt is destroyed beyond recovery. Obviously, you should be careful with this option.
Most word processors create backup files, scratch files, or both.
Also, it overwrites the file only once, which is enough to thwart conventional disk recovery efforts, but not enough to withstand a determined and sophisticated effort to recover the faint magnetic traces of the data using special disk recovery hardware.