Wipe Free Space passes? Options

[FlipD9]

How many passes does the Wipe Free Space option go through? Gutmann? NSA? DOD 5220.22-M?

[Augeas]

One pass of zeroes, I believe. The secure delete options are ignored.

[FlipD9]

Really? That doesn't do much for securely deleting previous deletes from not using CCleaner, it just makes files unrecoverable. I understand that it would take longer but an option where to permanently erase any traces of a file, even when using Recuva or any similar software, would be nice. Or would Recuva cover that part of phase as it's a recovery tool. I haven't really played with it much and don't know if it has a Secure Delete option for previously deleted files.

[Augeas]

I'm not quite sure of the difference between 'it just makes files unrecoverable' and secure deletion. In what way is unrecoverable less secure?

To be pedantic the file data would still be recoverable, but as it has been overwritten all that will be returned is a string of zeroes. There's no way any application in the world can return what used to be written there.

Recuva does have a secure delete option, run a scan, select your files, and right click to bring the option up. You even have a choice of overwrite methods should you be that way inclined.

[FlipD9]

When I run Recuva, there are still files that are not overwritten even when I used Recuva's own method. I was just wondering if having a more secure deletion for Wipe Free Space will completely erase those files from your drive?

[Augeas]

There are some files that Recuva can't overwrite: those contained entirely in the MFT, those overwritten by subsequent file creation, etc. A specialist free space wiper (such as Eraser) may help if you want to overwrite those, you can't tweak CC's wfs to do this.

[FlipD9]

Oh. Is CCleaner also limited to those same limitation as Recuva with Wipe Free Space.

I was going to comment about Eraser as well. Do you have any experience with it? Any precaution or tips?

[Augeas]

Recuva secure deletion and CC wfs are not the same bowl of gruel. Without going too deep into it, CC's wfs writes blocks of data over the entire unused space on the drive, and Recuva sd overwrites individual files. I don't think that Recuva sd will overwrite any slack or free space where CC wfs should do so, or at least be better at it. CC wfs does not touch the file names in the MFT (but CC secure deletion does).

All this is intuition and guesswork as I don't use either CC wfs or Eraser.

[FlipD9]

Oh. Thanks for the help nonetheless.

[kroozer]

I used Eraser successfully with Win98. Eraser started having problems with XP, and these trubbs grew with Vista. Last time I used Eraser to wipe my C: drive it filled up with temp data, stalled, and I could not regain the free space, requiring a full system recovery, which of course added even more non-removable files to the hard drive. I quit using Eraser.

[FlipD9]

Yeah, I'm on XP and I used it but my computer restarted as a Windows Update was installed that required a restart. After the restart, the Temp files from Eraser was still there and I just deleted them. Used CCleaner to clear them from my computer.

After reading some post here, someone pointed out that wiping free space too much will result in shorting your hard drive life. So I think I'll just stick with CCleaner as it's not as aggressive as Eraser.