Wipe Free Space feature = Darik's Boot and Nuke?

[GS458]

I love CCleaner, been using it for years. I always hated the fact that I couldn't clean the rest of my HDD with it though. Old Word documents, Excel documents, anything I deleted in my recycle bin by mistake before running CCleaner made me sad

 

And today I update my version of the program and find a Wipe Free Space option?

 

To deal with my aforementioned sadness, I began running Darik's Boot and Nuke once every year to delete the entire hard drive. I was also using this program when selling old hard drives (35 pass gutmann, usually two rounds of it...took close to a week).

 

To my question: does this new feature mean that I can keep my windows installation, but overwrite every inch of my hard drive that is not being used? Up to 35 times with the gutmann method?

 

Do I never have to re-install windows/office/millions of programs again?!

 

Somebody pinch me. Please.

 

I understand that this feature could take a long time to run, but I am very excited. Some clarification would be great...

[Andavari]

Wipe Free Space only does one secure pass to my knowledge. And yes using Wipe Free Space will remove the need to reinstall everything from scratch like what you've been doing with DBAN. But do note that Wipe Free Space may or will not be able to deal with files locked by the MFT. You can test its success using another Piriform freeware Recuva.

[GS458]

Wipe Free Space only does one secure pass to my knowledge. And yes using Wipe Free Space will remove the need to reinstall everything from scratch like what you've been doing with DBAN. But do note that Wipe Free Space may or will not be able to deal with files locked by the MFT. You can test its success using another Piriform freeware Recuva.

 

Should Wipe Free Space not work in the same vein as DBAN, is there a program out there that will?

 

I downloaded Eraser to see. I am running an unused space wipe of my C: drive with the Gutmann method as we speak. Is this what I've been looking for?

 

You may think that once a year is a bit much to be whining but on New Year's day this year I was told I had used all of the installations that my Microsoft Office disc could allow lol. Obviously if I buy another one I want to keep it until a new version of Office comes out.

 

So will Eraser do what I need it to do?

[wikitech]

Eraser will do exactly what you need it to do. DBAN is great for rebuilding systems from scratch. You only need to wipe one time, however. In fact just use DBAN defauts for those times you want to start all over with a fresh drive, OS, applications, etc.

 

Eraser, on the other hand, erases files, folders and/or free disk space. You will need to learn and understand how it works to be effective. Understand that when Windows deletes a file, nothing happens except the file name is removed from view and the space occupied is marked as available. So for your cleaning, you need to ask youself what you want to clean and why. To prevent casual review of your browsing history, use Eraser to delete directory entries and you're done. Takes a few minutes. If someone is likely to get to your hard drive and try to recover files, use the Wipe Free Space option along with deleting directory entries and, while you're at it, clean the cluster tips if you have a few hours.

 

Seriously, though, this whole cleaning thing isn't what it's cracked up to be. With IE8 it's even more complicated. Your InPrivate browsing files get deleted which means the files are still there and Recuva can see and recover them. So much for InPrivate. The only way around this is NOT to allow Windows to delete anything. That way CCleaner can be switched to do a secure delete, delete (and rename with Z's) and overwrite. But you've got to educate yourself on how to tell Windows NOT to delete files. If you allow any of those IE files to be deleted by Windows, you will need to use Eraser and/or a combination of Recuva and Eraser to get rid of the files and the directory entries.

 

Watch out for IE's Advanced setting Empty temporary files on exit. It's not the default but lots of user's check it. If you do, Windows deletes the files but leaves them exposed and available for recovery. Any time you think you've wiped out your browser traces, think again. Log on as an admin, run Recuva and see what you've left behind. Cleaners could get paranoid about all this. There is no way to do private browsing short of installing VMWare server with a separate OS then targeting it's temp file for a nuke session with Eraser.

 

InPrivate is the least of the privacy options. It simply is not private but it does delete the files automatically. It should be called AutoDelete (Recover with Recuva).