MAHEM

Sorry if I was unclear, but yes, I have done exactly what you mentioned, multiple times. I wanted to try something: I deleted the entire folder where all these e-mails used to be. As I mentioned, according to Recuva, these files had been previously overwritten by other files which were newer e-mail (.eml) files in that same folder. Now, when I delete this entire folder including these new files (After backing it up externally), run wipe free space after that, finally Recuva finds no trace of the previously deleted files nor the new files which I now deleted. It seems as if those new files overwriting the old (previously deleted) ones somehow prevented the traces from getting removed, if thats even possible...? Either way, now they seem to be unrecoverable as there is no trace after WFS. Now I ran a Recuva scan on the external drive which now contains the files, and it shows no recoverable files. So it seems like I've finally gotten rid of them. I don't even know how / why though, if some one has an idea, I'm curious to hear.

I ran a deep scan Have done drive wipe from both the Cleaner tab as well as seperately from Ccleaners Tools. in the options I've set the wipe to secure file deletion, and ticked alternate data streams, cluster tips and MFT free space. I also ran Active@ Kill Disk, and the problem persists. For some reason these files which all appear overwritten in Recuva, will not be overwritten by ccleaner nor recuva or kill disk. Yet I can still recover them with Recuva. When I do so, on some I get a notice of partial recovery, on some it says it was not recover but in fact it was, I am able to open the eml file, and the files seem 100% recovered. Any further ideas before I just wipe the entire hard drive?

So I've ran Ccleaner drive wiper again (wipe MFT free space, secure file deletion, 1 pass), and I still have a ton of e-mail files showing up in Recuva. They all show up as unrecoverable and owerwritten by another file, yet I was STILL able to partially (pretty much fully) recover a lot of them. These are all presumably files I've deleted old fashionedly, and windows has overwritten them over time. However I can still recover them. Would running more passes help? Or does Ccleaner simply ignore these files if they are "seemingly" overwritten by other files? even if they are apparently not, because I can still recover them..

I did this already, but I will double check the settings I used for the wipe and run another one just in case.

I'm trying to get rid of private files on a pc. A bunch I have removed with a shredder and some I have deleted just normally at an earlier time. I've ran Ccleaner to clean empty disk space. Now when using Recuva, I can no longer even locate the files deleted with the shredder, but some of the previously "ordinarily" deleted files have left a trace. They appear to be unrecoverable according to Recuva, BUT I'm still seeing filenames which happen to be e-mail subjects, and Recuva is able to show tiny bits of the email header. Recuva also shows that these have been overwritten with other random files such as newer e-mails, so I assume windows has written over them when the space was needed. The file location shows C:\?\, so it seems like some sort of a trace. The files are 2-20kb each, all non recoverable but still somehow there because the original file name is shown. Now onto my question: is there any way to totally remove these traces of the files? Without nuking the entire drive? Ccleaner obviously hasn't helped, and Recuva will not allow to securely overwrite them, I get a note saying "Not overwritten - previously overwritten by another file". So the file is gone, but the filename / trace is there.