Now and again I have a play with the Tor Browser Bundle. Whilst I'm playing I also have Recuva and CCleaner open - I run CC first to start with a clean machine.
When browsing under Tor, and after Tor is closed, an analysis with CC shows no files to be deleted. There is no sign of activity with Recuva either, no new files appearing during or after the Tor run. So where do all those temp files go? I can't get my head around looking at files on the browser and nothing being loaded onto my pc.
Yes, although I haven't tried FF's private Browsing I have tried IE's, and it simply deletes your internet history as you go along, or on browser close. The point is that the downloaded files are visible and possibly recoverable using Recuva. With the Tor Browser they appear never to have existed.
I've just run TOR for a while in a sandbox. Most of the sandboxed files are visible in windows explorer. (win xp, ie8)
You can track which files change as you visit sites. The changed files did not look like any temporary internet files that I recognized, seemed to be encrypted.
Might be possible to compare files and figure out what the app is doing, but I can't. Brain locked up tighter than windows ME after a couple of hours.
Interesting experiment, though.
Edit: An interesting suspect is the file called "startupCache.4.little"
at file path " . . . .\Tor Browser\FirefoxPortable\Data\profile\startupCache"
I didn't check before deleting tor (which I actually just played with last week) but it is possible the files (if any) are kept in the same folder as TOR