how effective is drive wiper

[daniel maritz]

I used ccleaner extensively on my dell optiplex gsx 260. I regularly ran the cleaner as well as wiped the free space(using one overwrite pass). I also regularly defragged the drive (using the windows utility) I also regularly did a disk cleanup and diskcheck(again using the windows utility)

My questions are:

1. How much of my browsing history remains?

2. How much of image and/or video files remains on the drive?

3.When a file is deleted does the spce occupied by it become free space or can it revert back to used space?

4. Are google searches just browsing history or are they stored in other locations apart from the temp or history files?

 

Forgive my ignorance please and try to answer in non technical terms.

[Nergal]

I used ccleaner extensively on my dell optiplex gsx 260. I regularly ran the cleaner as well as wiped the free space(using one overwrite pass). I also regularly defragged the drive (using the windows utility) I also regularly did a disk cleanup and diskcheck(again using the windows utility)

Over wiping will reduce the life of your harddrive

 

1. How much of my browsing history remains?

I don't know how to answer this ccleaner lists what it cleaned (or will clean if analyze is pressed). And everyone's pc and usage is different; so my answer is "very little, if any will remain from the covered programs".

 

2. How much of image and/or video files remains on the drive?

Ccleaner does not, by normal means, remove any images or videos from a drive, so I'm going to say all of them. If you mean "remain after a wipe" then no deleted items that have been wiped should remain for basic consumer recovery programs. That said, with limitless time and effort all data can be retrieved and the only way to make something completely irretrievable is to physically destroy the drive.

 

3.When a file is deleted does the spce occupied by it become free space or can it revert back to used space?

yes and yes. When deleted (or ccleaned, but not wiped) the space the file takes up is considered free space, the file still exists there (and can be recoveredh until that space is re-occupied by a new file;which is what wiping the freespace does, it fills those spaces with new files (containing gibberish) thus wiping out the old files, it then deletes the gibberish files.

 

4. Are google searches just browsing history or are they stored in other locations apart from the temp or history files?

If you are signed into google then they save your searches to your account, otherwise cleaning history, cache and autofill from the browser should be enough.Hope I wasn't too technical

[Derek891]

Hello Daniel and welcome to the forum. It's very difficult to describe how a hard drive works without getting technical, and I certainly make no claim to knowing anything more than the basics. I'll try to answer your four questions a simply as I can.

 

1.) As long as you deleted your browser history prior to doing a drive wipe, it's gone.

 

2.) As long as you deleted any other files prior to doing a drive wipe, they are gone.

 

3.) A bit more tricky - Free space refers to all the space that can be used to perform new write operations to your drive. It can exist in one of two conditions: either it was previously written to and used to store data, or it was never used and contains no data. This is because when you delete a file in Windows, the data still physically remains on the drive. All you are doing is changing a file table that the operating system uses to keep track of where the individual pieces of data are stored on the drive, and these little storage units are called sectors. Think of each sector as a mailbox with a flag on it. When the flag is up, it is in use, and cannot be used to write new data. If the flag is down, it is available for a new write operation, and then one of two things happen: either the old data that was previously stored there gets overwritten by new data, or a previously empty sector gets written to for the first time. So keep this in mind, when you delete a file in Windows, it does not completely disappear until all the sectors used to store it get overwritten by a new file. Also, defragmenting your drive can overwrite quite a few of these sectors as well, the thing is, you cannot be sure which sectors containing old data were overwritten and which were was not.

 

This is where a drive wiping utility comes in. In simple terms, it looks for all the sectors on the drive where the flag is down, and creates it's own file table of where they are located on the drive. Then it goes back and fills each of these sectors with zeroes, effectively returning these sectors to what appears to be an unused condition. That being said, entities like the FBI and NSA have very sophisticated techniques of recovering data, even after it has been overwritten. And that being said, a small town police force does not have these kind of resources, so you are probably safe from any casual examination that they would do.

 

4.) As far as Google searches, every search ever done by anyone is stored somewhere on one of their servers. So be warned.