Hi
I just registered in order to share my experiences of this problem.
I have been alternating between CCleaner Wipe Disk runs and Recuva (Deep Scan) runs on an old HDD (where, for the record, there was nothing illegal, but plenty of personal stuff). I must have run these 2 programs sequentially about 5 times by now and I feel there's a BIG problem. I've tried shutting down/rebooting in between runs, but I can't solve the problem.
CCleaner tells me that it will wipe my (entire) HDD with 7 passes (oooooo, NSA standard - serious stuff!). Then along comes Recuva and finds a bunch of files. Admittedly nothing major (mostly, it seems, .ttf font files, and the occasional .dll). I guess Recuva is REALLY GOOD at what it does.
However...CCleaner's performance seems to be a bit dodgy here. I mean, do the NSA really accept that after 7 passes, data could still be available on their old HDDs? Would the NSA consider using CCleaner?
It's not good enough to say that "You are wrong if you assume that CC is a 'clean to industry data sanitisation' standards. CC has never claimed to do that, it is primarily a temp file remover."
CCleaner IS claiming to "Securely erase the contents ... on a drive". It says so on the Drive Wiper page! It does NOT say that it will "just remove temp files", or even "securely remove most of the files, probably".
I don't want to keep picking on the same person/post, but the statement: "I don't think that any application running under Windows will do what you want, there's just too much going off in the pagefile, logfiles, heaven knows what files for that to be true." - surely cannot be true. As I understand the accepted methods of cleaning a HDD, each bit on the physical disk is actually overwritten - in the NSA case, 7 times. There are no pagefiles or logfiles (or any other files) that can somehow escape and survive this procedure. It is physically impossible. (Ask the NSA!!!)
Also, the idea that "you primarily want data destruction because you want to sell used hardware......then simply re-install the OS to have a usable computer again." is a COLOSSAL misunderstanding of the issue. Simply re-installing the OS does NOT remove the 1's and 0's previously written to the harddisk. Nor is formatting the drive any guarantee that old data is destroyed. The physical binary data is still there, and available to those that have the tools to find it - in the cases described on this page, a freely available utility called Recuva can do it. (No need for anything really advanced.)
Anyway...
I love Piriform software...especially the 2 mentioned in this post/thread. I use CCleaner on a weekly basis, and Recuva has saved my arse more than once. So I find it somewhat disconcerting to find out that I cannot rely on the former to do what it says on the tin. When a product claims to be able to erase a disk, and I use that product to erase a disk, I EXPECT THE DISK TO BE ERASED. If there is any doubt about the effectiveness, I don't mind - it's OK. As long as I am informed of that possibility. It's a question of trust. And I really, really, REALLY want to be able to trust these 2 little beauties.
