Why won't secure deletion work?

[HelmutBlack]

Wonder if any of yall have had this problem. I run CC at work and home. At work, I've set it to 7 passes, and it shows. The cleaning process is quite slow, especially if I've deleted a large video or something. But no matter what I do, on my home pc it only does one pass. I've checked the 7 pass option, and it just wizzes right through it. Both pc's have the same specs. Would there be any reason it would work on one and not another? Is this feature dependant upon a Windows service perhaps that I may have disabled?

[cde]

Wonder if any of yall have had this problem. I run CC at work and home. At work, I've set it to 7 passes, and it shows. The cleaning process is quite slow, especially if I've deleted a large video or something. But no matter what I do, on my home pc it only does one pass. I've checked the 7 pass option, and it just wizzes right through it. Both pc's have the same specs. Would there be any reason it would work on one and not another? Is this feature dependant upon a Windows service perhaps that I may have disabled?

 

A few points here:

 

If the machines have the "same spec", does this include hard drives? A faster home HD would explain things.

 

More likely though is the second point - I would imagine that your home machine is better defragged than your work machine, either through background optimization during idle time or by manual care. CC would have to seek around the fragmented disk for each wipe pass, making it slower, and probably a lot noisier... That one large video may be a contiguous 100MB block on your home HD, but could be thousands of pieces at work.

 

Also your work machine may have more Temp files if many apps are running or being installed/updated, or if it has a larger web cache folder, or for many other reasons (though this could be true of your home PC too). Don't assume that the 2 machines have the same amount to clean.

 

If the post-clean report says the same number & size of files were cleaned, but the time was vastly different, try defragging both machines and see what difference that makes. bear in mind that Windows XP defrag can still leaves some gaps between files, so a new big test file could still take different times to clean!

 

Basically, I'd suggest you be glad that it is fast at home. If you are doing stuff at work that needs a 7-pass cleanup, I would suggest you stop

 

Another quick point - your subject implies that you could recover wiped files, please be more careful how you phrase your questions. If you can't recover your files, then secure deletion worked pretty well

[HelmutBlack]

I had sorta considered that, but the difference is dramatic. Although the work computer has like 30 running processes and I have like ten. Thanks

[cde]

I had sorta considered that, but the difference is dramatic. Although the work computer has like 30 running processes and I have like ten. Thanks

 

I think the solution here is to be smug that your home PC works so much better!