Able to right-click system tray icon and "close" CCleaner whilst wiping drive

[King Mustard]

I was wiping a drive using CCleaner and decided to try to see right-click on CCleaner in the system tray and choose Exit.

The icon goes away from the system tray but the program still runs.

My drive wipe has not yet completed, so I am unsure what will happen when it finishes. Perhaps the program will close?

Ideally, whilst a drive wipe is happening, choosing Exit from the system tray icon would display a message asking if you would like to cancel the wipe or not.

[nukecad]

You really. really, don't want to stop a drive wipe other than by using the Cancel button on the CCleaner UI, and then waiting for it to tidy up and then stop.

A drive wipe works by filling up the free space (or the whole drive) with files containing zeros and ones, (or X's, or other characters), and then deleting those files.
That way if anyone later tries to recover from that wiped space all there is to recover is the zeros and ones.

If/when you do cancel a wipe then it has to clear up everything that it has already written before it closes.

Which will by why it kept running when you quit from the System Tray task, - so that it could clean things up after itself before closing.

It 'knew' that it shouldn't stop suddenly like that, and so it kept running after you quit from the tray, so that it could close properly.
Even if there was an extra yes/no option if quitting from the tray it would not make any difference, the drive wiper would still have to keep running to clean up what it had already done.

If it did stop suddenly then all those files it had written wouldn't get deleted/cleared; and so you would be left with hundreds (thousands) of files with odd random names taking up space on your drive, which you would then have to delete yourself.
(Running a new wipe won't do it, unless it's a full drive wipe which you can't do on the OS drive and may not want to on a secondary drive. For all the new wipe knows those are valid files just like any other file).

Users have has this happen in the past when their computer has crashed or been suddenly powered off, or there was a power cut, or if the drive got disconnected.
If any of those should happen during a wipe and suddenly terminate the wipe then all the files written to the drive so far get left on the drive.

PS, Is the drive that you were wiping a HDD or an SSD?
There is no need to wipe internal SSDs, the built in TRIM takes care of that. (External SSDs that are connected by USB don't get TRIM'ed so it may be useful there).

 

 

 

[Andavari]

On 05/03/2024 at 08:50, nukecad said:

You really. really, don't want to stop a drive wipe other than by using the Cancel button on the CCleaner UI, and then waiting for it to tidy up and then stop.

Exactly.

Some drive wiper/wipe free space programs (not referencing CCleaner in particular with this comment) have the potential of damaging the drive contents (files, and the filesystem) that they're wiping free space on such as the Windows OS drive if exited in an incorrect way such as forcing them to close. I had such a thing happen over 20 years ago (not with CCleaner), and I found myself minutes later reinstalling the Windows OS.