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marmite

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Posts posted by marmite

  1. May I ask, Marmite, what you mean by "completely overwritten" ...like, is there a certain amount of complete "passes" that happens before it is deemed unrecoverable? How would fragmentation play into this, in that the file is in many places over the HDD due to the lack of defragging and which indeed is why I mentioned it as a possible problem. Hope Im making sense

    Yep you're making sense ;)

     

    But no, I wasn't referring to the number of passes, I was referring to just parts of the file being overwritten as opposed to all of it being overwritten. Once data is overwritten no software can read it what was there before, as I said earlier.

     

    However you might get a scenario where, completely by chance, a file is partially overwritten by some process or other leaving the file 'semi-intact' to the point where 'a' file can be recovered, but it won't be quite the original. So depending on what type of file it is, you might get something that's enough to get what you wanted from the remainder of the file. I've seen this randomly happen with jpegs ... where you get part of a picture. But getting a usable file is extremely unlikely.

     

    And indeed to all intents and purposes it's not worth considering ... really I was just being unnecessarily pedantic. Where a file has been overwritten properly by secure deletion software (as in the software does it's job!) then a file won't be recoverable at all, even after just a one-pass overwrite.

     

    The lack of defragging on your brother's machine may increase the chance of some recovery ... but as people have said it's really down to how much use it's had.

     

    PS ... and I take it you have another drive that you can recover files to (like an external drive, or even a USB stick if you don't need too much space) ... Recuva doesn't restore files 'in situ'!

  2. Ah; thanks Tom. What I meant in my comment was that it's useful to be able to get hold of the hash. Whilst it seems their tool uses MD5 (which I didn't realise because the application doesn't tell you that; it just says 'compare content') it doesn't show you the hash in the output so you can't actually capture or record it. I'm sure I've seen some dupe finders that do give you the hash.

     

    But thinking further about how any dupe finder would have to be written to work efficiently, keeping a hash is by far the most efficient way of going about. I suspect that any program that does content comparison uses a hash under the hood anyway, whether or not it mentions it.

  3. Any dup finder that doesn't strictly use checksums like MD5, etc., are potentially risky, especially if they're only generically going by identical file names.

    It depends what you're looking for ... sometimes name and size only is enough :)

     

    But I think every program I've come across uses a binary comparison anyway, which is effectively the same as comparison via a checksum.

     

    That said, it's always useful to have a checksum ... you might want to keep it for a future comparison for example. Unfortunately that's one thing the Auslogics tool doesn't give you.

  4. Im thinking about 2 questions .... wouldve temp files from surfing the net overwritten these JPEGS by now? and wouldve the swap file done the same???

    Hi Musical

     

    The bottom line is that it's not the age of the files that is relevant. As you have already alluded to, it's the amount of data that's been written to the files in between time that is the crucial factor.

     

    The swap file is in a fixed location (unless of course he's recreated or moved it). But almost any other file written to that disk (like temp internet files, software patches/upgrades, software temporary files, log files etc) could have overwritten the old photos.

     

    You will see some files listed that aren't in a good enough condition to recover, as you have already discovered running Restoration.

     

    As kroozer says, best thing to do is to suck it and see. I'd set Recuva to deep scan and just see what's there. hazelnut's link and the documentation around it has all the info you need.

     

    Also, download the portable version and run it off a USB stick ... otherwise the Recuva installation will overwrite some of the space.

     

    No software will recover files that have been completely overwritten.

  5. Hi

     

    I can't think of anything that ccleaner does that affects drive mappings.

     

    Moreover, ccleaner doesn't run in the background, so if their mappings are just being randomly lost, then ccleaner cannot be responsible for actually dropping the connection.

     

    The only caveat to that would be if ccleaner was doing something when it ran that somehow affected the ability to make or keep drive mappings, but as I said before I'm not aware of anything that ccleaner doing anything like that and it wouldn't particularly make sense as a 'cleaning' activity.

     

    What mechanism are you using to make the drive mapping? And why do you need to reboot to reestablish this ... does the mechanism fail to work again once the mapping has been lost?

  6. Hiya Nullack

     

    xcopy should certainly work okay ... just make sure you go through all of the switches to make sure you set the right ones (like to get hidden/system files etc).

     

    There are lots of options ... ordinary Explorer GUI (not sure how many times you'd need to click the 'don't overwrite' button!).

     

    Also free tools like WinMerge.

     

    But xcopy is probably quickest and most straightfoward - especially if you're comfortable in the command line.

     

    You could always use free WinDiff afterwards to make sure the trees are identical.

  7. Must admit I've always viewed it as an info / object removal tool for things in certain standard categories and locations; key entries and stuff like BHOs and the like. So I can see why it's less use against modern malware; I just didn't think it was meant to be that sophisticated in the first place.

     

    Incidentally Andavari there's a sysinternal tool that will remove / rename at reboot, if you want to ditch HJT.

  8. hi..i heard that i could use CCleaner to clear my recent program list..by checking the user assist history? however my advanced section in windows tab is greyed out..why is this so and what should i do? thanks :P

    It's a UI style thing ... it's not actually disabled ... you should be able to check it :)

  9. Lovely clean, uncluttered design :)

     

    One observation: Because the topic titles are stacked vertically they take up a lot of real estate. There's a huge swathe across the top (340px deep on the home page) which effectively just has your header and six titles. That's okay on a big screen - but makes life harder on a netbook!

     

    You could compact that - for example reducing the depth of the dark blue area, and stringing the titles on one line; after all they don't open up to sub-menus. Obviously you don't want to detract from the overall style, but visually it might be worth experimenting with.

  10. Wot CTskifreak said.

     

    As a general comment, not just to the OP ... backing up personal data (as opposed to system files) whether it be music, documents, pictures ... anything that is 'yours' should ALWAYS be backed up before doing something like this. Hell it should be backed up anyway!

     

    If you haven't got space then beg, borrow or buy some but DON'T leave it to chance that it will just 'be there' afterwards or that you'll be able to get it back!

  11. HJT is useless now

    Why do you say that - is it because its functionality has been superseded and improved on by other tools?

     

    Surely it still works as far as "doing what it used to do" effectively?

  12. I generally make a C drive image once a month (or whenever I remember).

    Ditto (paid-for Macrium) to a separate external drive. I'm also running a RAID mirror.

     

    Data on other partitions is backed up using SyncToy to multiple external encrypted drives (one of which is kept securely away from home!).

  13. What would be the "other options" if them don't have admin rights?

    For example, you may be able to use group policy to restrict ccleaner changes by changing registry key permissions or file permissions so that they can't make changes to settings. I haven't tried this, but it may work depending on how ccleaner operates.

     

    Or you could change the folder permissions so they can't delete the IE history.

     

    Of course ... if you are relying on running on ccleaner to clean files that wouldn't work for you either ... so that would not be a very satisfactory solution.

     

    Also, like it or not, many badly written programs need admin privileges to run properly ... so you might find that doing this would prevent other programs from functioning.

     

    But if the users are not very technical, Andavari's option is probably the better one anyway :)

  14. Download and install Resource Hacker (freeware).
    @ Andavari. Nice find; haven't seen that before.

     

    @ luik. you would only have to do this once per new version and copy the deployables. Given the specialised functionality that you require that doesn't seen like much of an overhead! You have to redeploy the executable when you intercept a new ccleaner release anyway.

     

    Do your users have administrator rights? If not that gives you other options anyway. If they do, the can manually circumvent any restrictions you put in place if they choose to.

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