Augeas

Hi Adele. You have a female computer? You can untick the Cookies box in Windows/Internet Explorer or Applications/Firefox to keep all your cookies. Alternatively you can keep these boxes ticked and save any particular cookies you want by going to the Options/Cookies window and simply dragging the desired cookies from the left to the right panel. Don't worry about selecting the wrong cookies, you can move them to and fro until you get it right.

I agree the help stuff is rather basic. However there isn't an answer to 'should I delete this or not?' Not one that would be the same for everyone, anyway. More exoerienced users (in general, not you Joe) will be familiar with the majority of the options, after all we all know what index.dat files are. To have a detailed explanation of each item would end up with an absolutely huge narrative which every man and his dog would start nit-picking over. If there's anything I don't understand, and there is, I Google the item and then form an opinion from (some of) the thousands of hits.

Well, to be thorough Gutmann did advise disabling disk buffering before you start overwriting.... I am dismayed by the adherents of Gutmann. I can't think of any other example of an incorrect grasp of theory and practice being swallowed by so many so blindly. It's almost a religion. Data has never been written in its raw state to a disk. It couldn't be read if it were. All data is encoded by the disk's intenal software before being written to disk, including Gutmann's tables. In Gutmann's 1996 paper he briefly touched on 'the latest high-density drives' using PRML internal encoding (yep, that's what we're using). His paper (and his overwrite tables) does not cover PRML but the far older and relatively simpler RLL coding. Gutmann does not apply to current disk technology. As for PRML disks he says, quite correctly, that the disk's internal data processing is far too complex to try to interpret, so 'a good scrubbing with random data will do about as well as can be expected.' In other words, Gutmann says that using his overwrite patterns is a waste of time on disks produced in the last twelve years or more. Nobody seems to have read that bit. CC does of course not use random data in it's one overwrite pass, but binary zeroes. However the data is scrambled, encoded and expanded by the disk software before it's actually written using very complex proprietary software which can vary across disk types, or even different models from the same manufacturer. Even if you could read overwritten data you would just get back what appears to be rubbish. So, if you're using a Winchester drive and are worried, use Gutmann. If your disk was produced in the last fifteen years, you're wasting your time. I only wish that Piriform grasped that. Well, it is Sunday morning and I should really be doing something useful. I just have a thing about Gutmann.

I'm going to be vague on this bright but frosty morning. Does Defraggler actually defrag the MFT? Doesn't the MFT expand in contiguous extents in the 12.5% default allocation of the MFT Zone, so a defrag would be irrelevant? Unless your disk is absolutely jam-packed full of several millions of tiny files forcing an extension outside of the MFT Zone, or full of larger files that have been forced into the MFT Zone, then the MFT is quite happy looking after itself, isn't it? Can any software defrag the MFT on the hoof? Would any software want to? (I am not a Defragger or any defragger user. Ha ha!)

CC does not clean every file used when you use an application such as Firefox. There are logs, swap files, all the stuff that Windows thinks it needs to live and breathe. CC will (should) clean all the files it analyses. If you think that CC isn't cleaning something it should then post the file names here and we'll try to sort it.

I don't think that it's anything that's inherent in CC as a program, as it zips along for me in a few secs (I cleaned yesterday, 30 mb, must have been around 2 secs). But I run CC about twice a week, when it has around 30 to 50 mb to clean (hardly worth it, really). So maybe it's something in the amount and size of the files that are being deleted. Just to get one thing out of the way, you are using normal deletion (no overwrites) aren't you? Can you estimate what the files to be deleted are? Lots of small files, or fewer large files? Have you thought of running CC more frequently? As an aside I have never updated VB, C+, or much else in the two+ years of my PC's life.

And now I'm stumped.

Deleted, as I looked at it in its deleted state using Recuva.

I would be very surprised if CC has done this, and probably Piriform would be too. I thought that OE was part of XP and couldn't be removed? I'll go for shortcuts going too.

I just picked an innocent file with a date modified of 12/05/08 (I didn't look at its properties at all) and shift/del'd it. In Recuva/Info the date and time last accessed is today/now. So I guess a deletion acts as an access. I haven't tried all the other delete permutations but I should also guess that they count as an access too. PS File recovered fine, ta.

Ah, true, but my normal delete mode is just that. If I have anything I want securely deleted, and I do from time to time, I throw it in a folder which is included in CC, and run CC in one overwrite mode.

OK, when you run an Analyse, what is shown as the full path of the music files? Run Analyse, right click in the results window, press Save to text file, and save the file. You can refer to this file later without running CC again, it will be safer. Cut and paste a few of the music file paths into your post.

Not as far as I know, but if you are having troubles as you describe then I would not be worrying about cleaning up old files. You say you want to retrieve some data files, so perhaps you should try Recuva, which can be pointed at secondary drives.

If you sort Recuva List view results in a particular order, either name, date, size, etc., and then switch to Thumbnails view the sort order is lost. Can we please have the facility to sort the Thumbnails view, or maintain the existing order when switching to Thumbnails? Ta.

If the analyse step gives the correct path for your valuable music files then definitely don't run CC. Spend 20 mins and a couple of quid on CDRs and do a backup of anything you value, whether you use CC or not. Wait for someone to help you with your problem, I'm too kn****ed tonight.

I would be very suspicious of this sort of thing, if I were buying something over the internet.

Shift/Del.

I would say as long as your pc boots up OK and you don't notice any software acting strangely then a week would do (but on the other hand I still have one or two from several months ago - they don't take up much room and I can't be bothered to delete them).

Great stuff, MrG. I like the right click analyse/delete for individual items, now I can drag rubbish to my included folder and secure delete that. I did make the mistake of r/click and analyse my included folder, and then pressed Run Cleaner which wiped the lot, but mistakes were invented to learn from.

UG, Recuva won't rename deleted files. The only software that will, as far as I know, is disk free-space wipers. The alternative is either to wait until the names in the MFT are overwritten with new files, or, depending on how many of them there are, you could create say 100 or so few-byte files named aaa001.aaa to whatever and see if they overwrite the entries. (Oh yes, then delete them.) You could also get rid of Recuva on the pc in question. One overwrite with CC will rename all the files to be deleted and overwrite them with zeroes, if you choose that option, although as I'm not a recycler user you may want to have that clarified by somebody who is.

Include them in the Options/Include list. This option will delete everything in the named folders, so be sure that this is what you want.

Did you defrag the external drive? Windows itself (or the NTFS file management s/w) will rewrite older files/tracks/sectors that are sufferring from read difficulties, so I am told. Try recovering the file (to another device) and see what you get. Recuva is not infallible, that's some other bloke's job.

I know of no way that CC could cause this problem. If nothing seems affected then perhaps what you are apparently seeing is not what is happening, or some other setting is restricting/clearing your files. When you're offline can you bring up previously browsed web pages? If so, then you are storing temp int files. Have you tried copying the temp int file folder and then looking at what you've copied?

You can already do almost what you want. Do a scan, and then in the filename/path box enter .txt or whatever extension you want. At anytime without rescanning you can change the extension type to display another subset. The subsets can be ordered into date, size, path, state, name as you wish. Displaying a new subset will lose the sort order etc of the previous subset, but that's no great problem. If you scan with a file extension already specified then you will get a subset of results, but a whole scan has been done so you can change the extension without rescanning. If you are browned off with the scan time, cancel as soon as stage one is completed. It doesn't seem to make any difference, stage two info is still displayed.

If I look at Temp Int files with c:/properties/Disk Cleanup I go to the same location as if I just looked at C:\Documents and Settings\Me\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files. However Disk Cleanup shows less space used and what appears to be a different subset of files/folders than looking directly (but listing files using Disk Cleanup does invoke file compression). I think that that is a Windows thing. If CC is cleaning temp Int files OK and your browsing is unaffected I wouldn't worry about it. Maybe someone, or Google, has the tech reason for the discrepancies.