Hello all
First post here and as well am hardly a knowledgeable person on cCleaner or power user of it so this is probably a silly question but.
For a while now I have been worried about sensitive info that while I may delete it from my hard drive and do things like run cCleaner to clean out my memories, that still there could be info of it on the disk that in the right hands could be retrieved. In other words, basically from what I have been told that anything you delete is really not truly deleted but more marked to not show up and is freely able to be overwritten by anything.
So essentially its not that its not there anymore, its just that the OS isn't recognizing it as if it is. And as a result, with the write software and knowledge, it can be read and sometimes even reassembled to a degree.
Now I know about wiping a drive clean by doing a low level re-format which re-writes all zeros to it and that this is really the most you could do to fully get rid of everything, but the process of coping all the info I want to keep from one drive to another, then doing a low level format, then putting all the info I saved back on is a pretty time consuming task.
So is this what something like the Drive Wiper in using the Free Space option is for?
Is what this does is take all that unused space that has this left over info on it an write zeros to it all (or in some other way remove it) so that 100% its truly gone, but then also leave all the current and used files and spaces completely un-touched?
Again I know that is probably a real newbee question but I just thought I would ask before I played with it.
As well, for this one particular product, does it really work as flawlessly as that in terms of not messing with things I don't want removed or is there sometimes issues with cCleaner with that so I should look at some other product?
Not that I'm looking to knock it if it is as hey, its free and already does a amazing job for exactly what it is supposed to do and so there really isn't any more that you could ask of it, but I just wanted to ask before I used it.
As well, if it does work pretty well, are there any special setup things I should do or look for in the program to make the fullest effort to not have something I don't want messed with, messed with?
Thanks for any help.
