My operating system is Windows XP. I have just spent 7 hours wiping the free space on my hard-drive using CCleaner and a 7 pass overwrite. I was trying to permanently wipe all my previously deleted Thunderbird emails. I then ran Recouva to see if I could recover any of them and nothing
had been wiped. All the email files were recovered and stored in a zip file and were easily accessed and read. I would appreciate your comments on why CCleaner didn't work.
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I cannot understand that happened or your expectations.
I think the contents of a ZIP file should be totally irrelevant both to 7 pass overwrite and to Recuva.
Do you believe the zip archive was created by either Recuva or Wipe,
or did you for some reason zip them and then decide to delete and then change your mind again and spend hours doing what could have been a 1 minute secure erase of undeleted emails ?
Are you sure you are looking at what Recuva truly found, or some undeleted and therefore unwiped backup of the originals.
Are you even sure that you deleted the original and did not accidentally hide it ?
I note that you have no posts with the Recuva forum and wonder if there is some facet of Wipe / Recuva you may have misunderstood.
I would suggest that if you wiped free space and immediately used Recuva and absolutely nothing other than one zipped file was found then :-
Wipe did a perfect job of wiping thousands of deleted files which Recuva could not deal with,
and it is difficult to see how one zip file would have escaped the attention of Wipe unless it had not been deleted.
Are you aware that when you delete a file, Windows may first place a copy in the current system restore point.
It is possible that after you deleted the original and S.R.P. held a copy which was shielded from your 7 pass Wipe.
Later the current S.R.P. became obsolete and eventually it with its contents were deleted - and that is what Recuva found.
n.b. S.R.P. become obsolete and deleted by age or "heavy actions" such as :-
Windows Updates and Application Installations that create new S.R.P. that push the older ones over the edge ;
Windows Disc Cleanup will purges all S.R.P. excepting the current one;
CCleaner > Tools > System Restore
Defragging (by Windows itself or by 3rd party tools such as Defraggler)
Thanks for your response. Let me explain in more detail what I did. First, I wiped the free space on my C drive using CCleaner's Drive Wiper. (Incidently I also tried SDelete with the same result). The wipe was completed in about 7 hours and ended with no indication of any errors occurring. I then ran Recuva for Email Recovery on C drive to see if the wipe was successful. The Recuva scan found files which it placed in a zip file. The files in this zip file were then recovered by Recuva to anoither zip file on another drive. It actually recovered about 80 MB of Thunderbird eml files. All the files could be opened and read. Nothing had been wiped. How come?
I'm not a Thunderbird user but if it's anything like OE then emails - whether deleted or not - are held in it's own internal data bases and can't be securely overwritten by Recuva. The zip file is a special Recuva file that holds - when it is 'recovered' - the deleted emails from the databases. If you have Thunderbird installed then Recuva will always create a zip file - it doesn't actually exist on disk. Have a look at
http://www.piriform.com/docs/recuva/using-recuva/advanced-mode/recovering-deleted-emails
I don't know how you really delete emails from Thunderbird, probably from compacting it's databases, run as a Thunderbird utility.
Alan, can you please try experimenting with a little less jagged-edged posts? Cheers.
I am sorry.
I did not intend to be abrasive, but as I stated I could not understand what Angusdog had actually done, and assumed he had put the emails in the zip file before deletion
I was not aware that Recuva would create a ZIP of its results.
I was just giving my best guesses.
I used Thunderbird in the past, and when I first started using Gmail that was also delivered via Thunderbird.
I understand Gmail Servers do not instantly delete irretrievably any messages they have handled.
Question :-
If a Gmail message that was present in the local Thunderbox database is deleted from the local HDD and then wiped,
is it possible that another copy might get resurrected from the Gmail servers ?
Thanks Guys,
It sounds like the problem is with Thunderbird and not with CCleaner. I will post the question on the Thunderbird website to see if they have any answers. . I will let you know if I get any useful info from them.
I don't know if Thunderbird is like Outlook Express, but OE's mail store is a group of files (.dbx) that contain email messages. When you delete an email from within OE, the message is not removed, just flagged as deleted. To actually remove the deleted message from the OE .dbx file, I had to do a "Compact Folders" from within OE. Maybe Thunderbird operates in a similar way, but I don't know it's mail store file structure.
Does Thunderbird have something like a "Compact" function?
Yes, Thunderbird has a "Compact" function but in my case it didn't work. The files must have been corrupted. Yes, Thunderbird is like OE. The deleted email is flagged as deleted but it is actually just hidden, as mentioned above. When CCleaner wiped the drive it didn't recognize these files as being deleted. When Recuva scanned the drive to recover deleted files, for some reason it did recognize these files as deleted. So, after copying any emails worth saving to a new folder, I went in to Thunderbird/Profiles/Mail and deleted all the .msf files (index files) and also any other file that was over a few KB in size. I then ran CCleaner and Recuva again and the result this time was that all the files had been wiped. And Thunderbird was working as it should. Thanks.