hisb

Augeas, thanks for the useful response!

After doing the first erase of everything (not sure how long this took, my guess is ~10 min.), lots of the files that were in Excellent condition before were still in Excellent condition, i.e. were not over written. If the files had been overwritten, but I could still see the names, this wouldn't be a bug, thus I wouldn't have posted it here. That was an addendum at the bottom of my post for a requested future capability for Recuva (sorry, didn't mean to confuse anyone). The reason for this post is files that should have been overwritten by secure delete (files that weren't resident in the MFT or had other things precluding there being overwritten) were left unaltered after secure delete--they were still green. At a different time, I selected all all Excellent and Poor condition files (i.e. green and orange). Directly after doing this, I was able to select files individually or in small groups and delete them. Again, some I couldn't delete because of being in the MFT, but this is to be expected. Lots of others, though were deleted. These were files that were not deleted before, and were obviously not currently protected by being resident in the MFT. This seemed to happen most of the time when selecting everything (green, orange, red), some of the time when selecting only orange and green files, and only once or twice when selecting a small group of files. How often do files change status of being resident in the MFT? Perhaps I was able to delete the additional files after their status was changed (though I would commonly do the second delete within a minute after the first delete).

Only some of the files were marked as such, most weren't. However, most of the files marked as deleted and not marked as protected by MFT still remained in "excellent" condition after a rescan. If it were only the files protected by MFT that weren't deleted, I wouldn't have posted this as a bug

I've tried to use the feature to securely delete everything found (I opted for the NSA algorithm). After deleting all files (note: some files were not deleted as indicated in the post-delete log), I rescanned the drive hoping to find nothing (except for what was given in the log), and I found what appeared to be everything that was there before, with no noticeable change in the state. I've tried this several times, restarting the program, etc., but nothing seems to work. I've done further testing with select groups and individual files, and it seems I am able to delete some files (e.g. 15 out of ~2000 files, though some of those not deleted were resident in the MFT), but doing this required highlighting for some, checking for others. This seems to be quite glitchy. Also, while it's great to be able to securely delete files, if I can still see the file names, I don't care if NSA or Gutmann says the file cannot be recovered, I don't consider it to be securely deleted. I'm using Vista Ultimate and Recuva file version 1.18.0.344.

@ leecherman Recuva has the option to securely delete files it has found (i.e. files that have been deleted), so having the functionality in CCleaner may be redundant. However, there may be some glitches with this option not deleting all files (eve if they aren't protected by being resident in the MFT). My point for this post is that Piriform already has a product that is supposed to do what you ask, but it doesn't seem to work. If you want this functionality from Piriform, you'd probably be better off working through the Recuva forum. I'm really hoping Recuva becomes something that is more user-friendly than Secure Erase, but just as secure, too.