Adults with children might feel uneasy in regards to files stored on their notebook arising from their website visits, or their children's. Software applications tasked with finding graphic pictures and / or scanning for encrypted porn, should optionally clean porn videos from permanent storage wherever they are, when requested. Most programs start up a file erasing algorithm that cleans deleted items to guarantee that they can't be retrieved again. Deleting files in this way is common for cleanup utilities in this range.

Most software detectors of porn can deal with scanning various document types and then testing for obscene words. Analysis starts by seeing if keywords exist in a list of known suspicious words that must be checked for. 'Suspicious' might mean obscene phrases regarding sexual behaviour and adult related issues; inappropriate language such as racist remarks, violence, words inspiring hatred or such undesirable topics; abuse of privileges; all of these can be detected and then displayed as the scan results obtained during the scan. If any suspicious items are found they can be assigned if necessary for more review by the user of the software, and make a decision on how best to treat the individual files on a per-file basis.

Tidying up any hard drive that has porn files may be assisted by one of the many special automated applications that are now freely available on the software vendors' websites. Most if not all of these detection and cleaning products are designed to clean up pornography off storage drives and improve file retrieval speed. Adult material detecting applications are custom designed to rapidly clean porn and also delete the unwanted videos and pictures cached in your hard drive straight away. Any of these utilities (with few exceptions) specialize in picture analysis, RealMedia format detection, hard disk scrubbing and even more checks.