Augeas

Well, these things happen. Windows does all sort of stuff in the background to amuse itself. It would probably take an exact spec of your pc, what was running on it, what you did exactly, and an intimate knowledge of Vista to find out what happened. I wouldn't worry about it really.

I should save them to a flash drive, or another external drive. It's the safest thing to do. If you have a d partition then that will do, assuming the payroll stuff lives, or lived, on the c drive. Saving to a cd means that they have to be written to cdr, and Recuva won't do that. I guess that a large file will be created somewhere ready to be written to cd, and that is bad news, as it will overwrite space on the disk that might, and quite possibly does, hold the files you're trying to recover. Stop everything on your pc except running Recuva, and recover files to a separate device.

CCleaner.ini

Couldn't really say, then. In the original post you say that you deleted the files then 'Immediately loaded Recuva.' Does that mean installed and ran, or just ran? Installed would of course create many new files: whether running creates any temporary files I don't know. How did you look for your deleted files? Did you sort the list by filename, or filter the list?

Did you miss out the bit after 'I formatted my computer' that says 'Then I reinstalled Windows'? You could try a deep scan with the option Scan for Non-Deleted Files checked. I wouldn't think that the odds on success are too high, though.

Thanks, H. It doesn't say a great deal. It appears to say that it wipes the entire drive, but says nothing about removing filenames from the MFT (apart from very small files, which seem to be left alone). It's about time some free space wipe user posted what actually happens. Do filenames go? Can you still see deleted file data in the MFT - name, size, directory - even though the data is wiped? Yet it can't just wipe unallocated sectors without reference, or being under the control, of the MFT management software. Imagine wiping a few sectors just as, or just after, Windows writes something really important there.

How did you delete the files, to the recycler and then delete them, or simple shift/del? Files deleted via the recycler will be renamed by Vista. It's known that files newly created and then deleted are likely to be 'lost' immediately. Newly created filenames will fit into the first available slots in the MFT. When they are deleted these slots become available for reuse and are quickly overwritten (by Windows logs, recovery, shadow files, etc), making them undetectable by Recuva (or any other recovery program).

Yes, zeroes has been mentioned somewhere.

All six columns in Recuva are sortable, aren't they? And filterable by filename or path, and the results sortable too.

As far as I know.. Recuva deep scan will also include the 'shallow scan' findings, which includes small files marked as deleted that reside entirely in their MFT entry. Using Recuva to overwrite deleted files will not touch these MFT entries. There is not enough info around to tell what CC free space wipe really does. Does it wipe free space pointed to by deleted file entries in the MFT (speedy run) or does it manfully plough through the entire disk wiping every sector (slow run)? What does it do to the small entries in the MFT? These questions are rhetorical. Until more experience and reports are posted, and the documentation arrives, it's a bit of a guessing game. I have no experience of Eraser at all. As a small reassurance, the fact that some sectors on your disk have one pattern of bits (f'rinstance a .png file) rather than another pattern (f'rinstance zeroes or random noise) is no detriment to your pc or enjoyment of ilfe.

I don't know, I have no experience of it. Perhaps that is how it is intended to work?

And some peculiar VB advert! (Put a jokey sign here.) I was going to add that those who never get Piriform problems have no need to post their spec, but that was too much like tempting providence, whoever she is.

There have been several reports of this facility taking some hours to complete, depending on the size of the disk. The facility is too new to have any experience with it as yet.

If you have recovered as much as you can, and accepted that there is nothing else you can get off the drive, then you may wish to run defraggler or some other defragmentation application. Before then, don't even think about it. Defragmenting will certainly overwrite some or many deleted files on the drive that may at the moment be recoverable. I would not think that defragmenting will make corrupted files readable. I certainly don't think that it will find any more files than are already available on your drive. I imagine your drive is NTFS. I think that NTFS is better at managing fragmented files than FAT32, but only if the files are valid entries in the MFT. What happened to the deep scan? Have you recovered any files? If so, put them on a flash drive, in a new folder, somewhere safe. Yes, all those cds go to landfill. Look at all those 'free' cds/dvds included with national newspapers and weep. I live a few miles away from a recycling plant that accepts cds, but only new overruns, etc. I don't know why old cds aren't recycled, they are clean.

Because it would take all day. I don't want CC or anything to touch any part of your list of files, it seems customised for your specific wants only. I'm sure that with a little effort you could create some sort of command line file to do what you want.

It might give a clue to what CC is actually doing when it overwrites free space. I assume you had to delete these files? I wonder what would happen if someone opened an Explorer window on the c partition (showing some free space at the bottom of the file list), then ran CC wipe free space on that partition. Perhaps files would appear and then disappear before your very eyes?

Can you monitor your sys restore points, they are notoriously large in Vista, and apparently include some user files?

I get the feeling that you are still using your pc, to browse and post here and whatever else. Every time you access a web page, or post something, or email, or touch your pc it is making your chances of recovery more remote, as more files are being downloaded/created on top of what you are trying to recover. If this is your only available pc you must do as little on it as possible. If a deep scan finds anything then recover it/them to a flash drive. If there's no luck there then it might be worth asking locally if there is anyone experienced enough to help you recover your data. Just don't let any amateur play with it, find a specialist and beg. It may cost, but it may well be worth it. Unfortunately this is a prime example of the old rule, if you have anything you value on your pc then back it up occasionally. Even I dump my worthless user data once a month to a cdr. Just copying your data folder to a flash drive every week would have been something that now you would give a great deal for. With a shared pc this is even more important. I know this isn't much help to you, but it might jolt some other reader to backup now. Most of the problems with lost data come from users who thought their pc would last forever. Good luck.

The precaution I am taking is to wait to hear other's experiences, or at least wait until the documantation is available from Piriform. But then I don't really have the need for this feature at the moment.

I guess so, but I am only a user, so I have to guess.

Possibly a registry issue. I would hold off running registry clean until the problem can be identified.

From what I can make of M/S's description of Sdelete, it is saying that it doesn't (and can't) use its chosen secure overwrite method, to wit the DOD standard, to overwrite file names in the MFT, so instead it renames the files 26 times, which might be considered secure if not overkill. If Sdelete did what it said then one would end up with a jam-packed useless disk. It doesn't seem to say that at the end of the allocation and overwrites/renames it deletes all the files it has created, but perhaps I'm nit-picking. I have no idea how Piriform are going to manage overwriting 'spare' filenames in the MFT, and they probably won't tell us. I hope they won't use Sdelete's method. Maybe it will be to scan the MFT, count up the number of slots containing deleted file names, allocate the same number of new small files with some max length file name, then delete the lot. Huh, anyone could do that!

As soon as you click on download you are presented with 'Version v2.17.853 (3,111KB)'. The slim versions are even er, slimmer, under 1 mb.

Just click on the icon next to the particular group, and hey presto, it is done.

You cannot run the normal functions of CC (delete temp files, etc) on any other drive than the c: the only thing you can do on other drives is include files/folders to be deleted, or to overwrite free space (which is being debated at the moment). I don't think that either functions are what you want. You could back up the data you want to keep on your e drive, format it, and reload the data.