So I chose the option to wipe the free space through the cleaner tab under the advanced section, and it told me I have 860,976 MB worth of data to wipe. I only have about 1 TB of space total, so this kind of made me a bit nervous. I was worried I was wiping my entire drive or something. I aborted the cleaning at about 100,000 MB
I'm probably just being paranoid, but I'm not exactly tech-savy so if something were to happen to my computer I'd be a bit lost on how to fix it.
My question is: Is this normal? Am I safe to let it go about it’s business? Can I restart the wiping process without any issues?
Well if it's wiping 860976 and you have only 1.4GB of your drive currently used then that number is correct.
However 2 things here:
1 because you stopped it, you will need to rerun a wipe, or locate the ccleaner created files (at the root of the drive there should be one or more new, oddly-named (string of characters as a name) files. Permenatly delete them.
2 Wiping the drive on a regular basis will lead to your drive prematurely dying. We, here in the forum, usually advise users only wipe when selling/retiring a hard drive, to avoid extensive wear on the hard drive
That's good to know, thank you. I haven't wiped my free space prior to now, but I had assumed it was something you do regularly to keep your drive clean. I'll just go ahead and try to find the folder containing the empty files.