Does Recuva show securely overwritten files no matter what?

[rjo98]

I know Recuva just looks in the MFT to see where a file used to be then overwrites that space, or something along those lines, but have a question.

 

I just had ccleaner do a wipe free space with a single overwrite pass. I then go into recuva and have it scan, and it says there's a few thousand files that it can overwrite. I have the show securely overwritten files option turned off in recuva.

 

Shouldn't it show me very few files to actually overwrite since ccleaner supposedly just securely wiped all my free space, which is where most these files would exist?

 

Although I haven't done testing to get real hard data/numbers behind it, it also seems that if I run recuva, have it overwrite all the files it finds, then run it again, it tries to overwrite almost the same number of files again. I realize some have other files in place so they can't be overwritten, but just wondering if anyone else has experienced that too?

[Andavari]

Recuva never shows anything recoverable for me after using CCleaner's 'Wipe Free Space' with 'Wipe MFT Free Space' enabled.

 

One thing to look into is if you have the 'Wipe MFT Free Space' box ticked in CCleaner's 'Options->Settings'.

[Augeas]

Recuva on a normal scan will always show more or less the same number of files found after it has overwritten them. Recuva overwrites the file data but can not modify the entries in the MFT, so te same file names will come up again. And again. You could follow Andavari's advice and run Wipe MFT in CC.