Hi There!
Could someone kindly explain Piriform's Recuva on how to use its secure deletion as I am confused with the TWO options it gives when you right click the mouse to delete- 1) secure deletion when you highlight the content; 2ndly) secure deletion by checking the box on the content.

My question is WHY 2 types of deletion methods? And WHAT'S the Difference between the 2 options? As both the options gives the same result saying, 'once you delete the item you never able to recover.'
Which of the 2 the best option to go for when deleting a content or an item. Once deleted where does the deleted content/item go. Can they be recovered again with Recuva or other software available.

Thank you for your kind reply to a novice to high tech software. KJ

There's no difference in the deletion method, merely in the selection of entries to be deleted. Whichever one you use is up to you. Highlighting is easy for quickly selecting a block of entries, and checkboxing is required for selecting separate non-contiguous entries (which highlighting won't do).

The overwritten entries, or rather the data they point to, don't go anywhere, they are, as it says, overwritten. Although you can recover an overwritten file with Recuva or other software it will just be zeroes or a random string of chars. The entry name is not overwritten as it is not possible to do this safely.

Dear Augeas,

Firstly I want to say Thank you for taking your precious time to read and reply to me.

So to summarise what you mentioned above, about deleting is that, checking a box is when you want to delete a specific content or item individually and highlighting is a group or collection of contents and items. Am I right in how I understood what you wrote about cecure deleting?

When you recover a overwritten file, document,pictures or folders etc, the orginal of these is destroyed and something else is written over it except for the titles? Is that what you mean?

Thank you once again for yuor response. Much appreciated. KJ

Yes, more or less. If you want one file to be overwritten securely then either highlight the entry or check the box and then right-click and do the business.

If you want a block of files to be overwritten securely then highlight or check the boxes as above.

If you want several files to be overwritten securely whose entries are not adjacent to each other then you will have to use the check-box method, as highlighting will not 'stick' on multiple entries.

The end result is the same.

When you securely overwrite a file the original is destroyed at the time of overwriting. If it is recovered you will only see the overwritten data.