CCleaner or Recuva

[Technical_13@Yahoo.com]

Is there anyway that you could intergrate a feature so that if you delete a file and you empty recycle bin or if it is to big to fit in recycle bin in the first place, that you could make that/those files unrecoverable?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited by moderator to reduce size of text

[pwillener]

Have you tried the 'Secure Deletion' feature of CCleaner? Were the files still recoverable after this?

[Guest_Jim_*]

I just tried that, doing a secure deletion then seeing if Recuva could get the files. It did, even the Gutman 35 pass didn't cause its status in Recuva to fall from excellent. The names were changed, so I couldn't tell what they were, but the extension didn't.

Maybe Recuva can't be beaten, or CCleaner wasn't actually doing the over passes, or something else entirely, but until the issue is resolved it doesn't appear the files are made unrecoverable.

[pwillener]

The question is whether the recovered files did contain any data, or if they were completely zeroed-out.

[Guest_Jim_*]

I had done it with a pdf file I no longer needed, and it opened fine each time. I'm trying to do it again now with a different file that I could put up, but it isn't working now. I swear it was opening up fine after each recover yesterday, though I can't remember if I looked after the Gutmann, but I've just been trying to duplicate the results and I can't. Even the single pass has made it unreadable. Very odd. I just downloaded the same pdf to try again with that and no luck. I guess there isn't any problem with the secure deletion. Sorry about that, I don't know why it didn't work yesterday, but today works great.

I will say this however, I do believe there should be an easy way to securely delete specific files. Perhaps a Secure Cleaner for CCleaner, separate from the normal cleaner, that can have different options selected from the regular cleaner. Also, could Recuva have the ability to not show some files, like those it sees as unrecoverable, or poor quality? That would make securely deleting files faster because only those that need to be wiped would be, and not all the other files CCleaner gets, that are inconsequential, and could shrink the list in Recuva by showing only those it can definitely get.

[Technical_13@Yahoo.com]

Is there anyway that you could intergrate a feature so that if you delete a file and you empty recycle bin or if it is to big to fit in recycle bin in the first place, that you could make that/those files unrecoverable?

 

Edited by moderator to reduce size of text

 

I guess what I was trying to say was a way to add a feature to wipe free space.

I tried this program called cyberscrub the other day and it seemed to work great for that feature. Now that I have a clean drive to start with, I should be able to continue with CCleaner and keep it clean.

Although it would still be a great feature in a future version. (Like if my drive ends up looking like my room)

[Augeas]

None of the disk scrubbers will give you a clean drive, they just overwrite what's there with a different kind of rubbish (zeros, or random chars, etc.). What they may do is remove the file names from the file allocation table (or whatever it's called), giving you the impression that the disk is 'clean'. It isn't.

 

Overwritten files aren't recoverable by anyone. Until recently CCleaner didn't overwrite all files it deleted when the secure deletion option was chosen. The current version does (in my experience), so you should be safe. I don't really worry about all those deleted file names that Recuva shows, although I am amazed that there are so many!

 

Rgds.

[everling]

I second the motion for CCleaner or Recuva to have disk scrubbing functionality, at least on a partition level.

 

Reasons:

- would like to scrub files that was deleted normally,

- we sometimes make multiple copies scattered all over the place and some of those copies may be deleted normally,

- moving files across partitions might leave unsecurely deleted old copies,

- Windows might cache copies in pagefile or temporary files that were deleted normally,

- questionable trust in Windows file encryption (an explanation on why CCleaner doesn't securely delete those files would be welcomed),

- makes it more convenient to deal with sensitive data,

- makes it more convenient to securely retire an old harddisk,

- I'll donate 5 USD for this feature .

 

 

[Edit]

Sorry for the triple post. I had problems connecting to your web server, although ping was fine, and didn't noticed that I had 'refreshed' one too many times. I had to refresh more than 10 times to get to this point.