oaker47

Hello Alan, Many thanks for your very thorough response. I have to admit that you are streets ahead of me in understanding the technology though. I guess I have no reason to think that my system is in any way particularly vulnerable. I use Kaspersky Internet Security which appears to look after me very well. I think my initial curiosity in respect of keeping private data private arose after I deleted some family photos from both my camera card and my PC. I had to buy Photo Recovery to retrieve them from the camera card, (luckily I realised immediately what I had done and didn't overwrite anything). However, I have fairly recently bought a new PC owing to the demise of the hard disk on the old one and couldn't find any licence details with which to download the program again - so I opted for Recuva and was amazed at how data that I thought was gone pretty much forever was still there or was at least recoverable. Coming from the same organisation it then was logical to go for CCleaner, in the knowledge that the two were likely to interface perfectly. I'll sign off now and thank you for your input, which I shall digest at leisure tomorrow. All best wishes to you.

Hello Alan, Thank you too for your response. I "shred" my session documents using Privacy Guardian and the Gutmann method, so they do tend to mostly disappear. Occasionally, for reasons that are beyond me, but that you may be alluding to, Recuva does find the odd one fairly intact and recoverable. I still have XP Home Edition, SP3 and am not driven by the mostly cosmetic differences in my opinion to move on just yet. I have located the check box that you refer to and it is indeed optimised for quick removal. Now here we are at the fringe of my knowledge of this particular area - can I interpret that the particular cache you are referring to is located om my hard disk, whilst the actual files that are being processed are on my USB drive? Would this mean that I would have to exercise some deletion/overwriting on my hard disk to achieve a more positive removal - and is this cache deletion covered by any of the Advanced check boxes in CCleaner to achieve this? Sorry if I am displaying my ignorance at this point, but I am keen to acquire this knowledge. Best regards.

Hello again Augeas, Thanks for that. I'm not about to get paranoid about security to the "nth degree" at my time of life (I am a slightly silver surfer), but I see forums loaded with pleas for help from all kinds of folk because they have become infected with this, that or the other and I do wonder just how careless you need to be to get that deep in the brown stuff? I'm not a "geek" by any means, but there was a time, some 20 years ago in my professional life when the manual work that I was doing went computerised and my employer automatically assumed that there was no way that I was going to be able to cope, so he brought in a young and unmotivated young person who knew nothing about the industry but could work an Apple Macintosh computer. I, in a fairly senior position had to hand 22 years of acquired knowledge to this person, who effectively took my job away because they had some computer knowledge and at the time I didn't. From that day on I have made it my business to learn as much as I can and to be as tough a target as possible for anyone else that ever tried to benefit from what I didn't know about computers. I've enjoyed your dialogue that has no doubt added to my knowledge in pursuit of that aim. All best wishes.

Hello again Augeas, Some answers for you then . . . The WFS took slightly under 8 minutes to do its work on a 2GB USB drive. Two files were created - one in excess of 19KB, the other more than 2KB. Both appeared to be deleted at the end of the WFS. Recuva found three captioned instances of the target file this time - one was displaying a thumbnail of a different .JPEG and two had no thumbnail displayed at all. The Recuva file info showed that they had been overwritten by other files. The "Last Accessed" date was that of the WFS and the time was indeed zero'd. The Header Info displayed a complete array of zero bytes in each instance. Finally, I would ask again about the deleting original file names before deleting (either using Privacy Guardian or CCleaner) - are you saying that even if I change a file name before deletion/shredding/overwriting, a reference will exist somewhere on my system carrying the original name? Many thanks for your continued response.

Hello again Augeas, I have now conducted a repeat experiment: Again I copied a .jpeg file to my USB drive and deleted the resultant copy file there. This time I waited 5 minutes, after which I dis-connected the USB drive and waited a further 5 minutes before re-attaching it. I then asked CCleaner to wipe all the free space on that drive. After I had done that, I asked Recuva to search the drive for all deleted picture files. This time it did find 2 copies of the .jpeg, but they were not recoverable and there were no thumbnails. Do you think that this confirms the last of your theories: "* The file was created almost exactly when you ran CCleaner"? With regard to the file names - am I still correct in thinking that if I re-name files before I use CCleaner or Privacy Guardian to bleach/over-write them, the original file names will no longer exist anywhere in the system? Best regards.

Thanks for your further contribution Augeas, Some food for thought there. Will do some further investigation and come back to you.

Hi ident, Apologies for the delay in getting back here. I will try to address your points in the order stated. The drive on my PC: AMD Athlon II X2 240 Processor, 3.5GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 9500GT, MS Windows XP Home SP3, is NTFS formatted. The USB drive I used is FAT. The particular .JPEG file should not have been over-written as this was one continuous real-time operation. Same again re the overwriting theory: I copied the file from my PC desktop to the USB "E" drive, established it was there, then deleted it. I then "wiped" all the free space on that drive and the MFT free space. After that, I asked Recuva to search the "E" drive for any deleted picture files, whereupon it found the one I had deleted and overwritten (?), showing TWO examples of the relevant thumbnail. "* The file was created almost exactly when you ran CCleaner." - as I say, this was one continuous operation; not hurried as I was aware that I needed to back-check every step so that I could ultimately repeat the procedure. Do you have any advice on how to remove actual file names - rename the file before deletion and overwriting perhaps - or is there another way that genuine file names can be removed? I should say at this point that I have tended to use Privacy Guardian to remove unwanted files, working history and so on, as I find it does the job so much quicker than CCleaner, but I would like to turn the whole job over to CCleaner. That's about as much as I can add to this scenario at this time. Best regards.

Hi Augeus, Thank you for your interest - that's two yesses to your questions. Best regards eljay.

Hi All, As a fairly recent new user, I am still getting to grips with interfacing CCleaner and Recuva and set myself a task to see how competent I was. The results were pretty grim and I am posting here in order to try and establish what I am doing incorrectly. As a test piece, I sent a .jpeg image to a USB drive folder, then deleted it and asked CCleaner to overwrite all the free space on that drive. I then asked Recuva to try and recover any deleted files on that drive. The .jpeg was still there and in recoverable condition, with two (why?) intact thumbnails on display! As well as this, I would appreciate hearing of any practice/procedure that would avoid my arrival at overwritten (but really how securely?) files, but the original file names are still there "Bank Statement January 2010" etc. Should I get a nasty on my PC, however difficult it may be for the bad guys to retrieve my info, I would prefer not to be telling them where to look! Any advice appreciated - best regards Eljay.

Many thanks for your assistance - will take a look.

Hello all, I am a new poster here, so please forgive a rather pathetic first posting. I have had CCleaner installed (free) for more than a year now and to date have usually only run it to remove unneccessary junk from my PC. The main privacy software I have used to date is Privacy Guardian and I had faith in it's user-friendly method of hopefully removing all sensitive but unwanted junk from my PC. However, I recently tried out the "Bleach Free Space on Disk" option in case the areas where I had been cleaning were not the only references on my hard drive and I might therefore be vulnerable still in the event of a Trojan assault. Whilst most of the files were shredded, fragments remained, as did file names. Maybe I hadn't configured it correctly - who knows? I was concerned that file names might give an interloper the edge in knowning what data could be worth persuing. Whilst swatting up on the larger scope of what CCleaner is capable of, I came across a reference to its free space wiping ability and was keen to give it a try. I quite stupidly un-checked all the boxes in the Windows section except the wipe that I required. It appeared (at least, without the deep scan facility) to remove both files and their names and I was so impressed that I made my PayPal donation. I had not made a note of the in-place default settings for the Windows element, thinking that they would be restored upon re-boot. I'm somewhat embarrassed that this didn't happen and more or less in the same state about admitting that my computer knowledge doesn't extend to checking all the right boxes to re-configure it as it was originally downloaded. Sorry to be a complete pain, but would anyone like to remind me what they were please? In return I can only promise to scour this website for as much knowledge about the product as I can aspire to, so that my next posting here might not be so feeble! Thank you in anticipation of your patience for a quite "silver surfer" who ought to know better. Best regards - oaker47.