Saska

Quote - "Wiping 35 times, a la Gutmann, is a waste of time" .Well,that's your opinion !. I'd previously tried the single & 7 pass driver wipes,that's why i contacted Piriform in the first place,neither of those wiped anything. As for 'did i wipe the MFT' - look at the title of this thread. Only when i'd used the Gutman process to wipe the MFT,did i get any result at all.That's why it's so very puzzling as to why one single file name should remain after all the other's have been wiped - they were all (presumably) in the same place,within the MFT. I agree that all the Excel entries 'should' have been removed,but they weren't - that's the problem.

A few months ago,i re-hashed several Excel files that i'd created,mostly to do with on-line banking & billing,none of these contained info.useable by anybody. I copied much of the old files onto the new ones & then used 'File Shredder' to shred the old files.I ran 'Recuva' to see what it could recover,& there were the file names of all the Excel files that i'd 'Shredded'. Ok,that's fine,the info. within the fies was gone - period !,but suppose one of the files was called 'My £ million bank account' ( i wish !),then the very fact that the file name remains,would indicate to a 'person' that i did indeed have a £ million bank account,something that i'd maybe wish to keep to myself. I did contact Piriform over this & they recommended that i run CCleaner's driver wiper using the Gutman process, to wipe the free space on the drive where the files had been kept. I did this a couple of days ago.It took close to 6 hours to run the driver wiper & at the end of it i ran Recuva to see if anything remained. Of the 6 Excel file names,5 had been wiped,but one still remained - how can that happen ??. The file location is given simply as H:\..... Personally, i feel that if all the information inc.file names isn't going to be 'wiped',then we should at least be given a file 're-name' function within 'Recuva'. It's the only criticism that i have of the Piriform software that i use,that 'private' info.can still remain after a supposedly 'secure' deletion.