Thanks for all your help. I hope you don't mind, Augeas, but I've been trying to get confirmation on this straight from the horses mouth for the sake of safety. And waiting again.
I think I'll move on to one of the many other very similar products that can do this. I've just had an awful user experience all because this company cannot do the following:
Keep their own online help docs current
Not having support chat
Not having phone support for those willing to pay
Waiting hours before getting an email response back. Each time in a multi-question back and forth correspondence that would have taken only minutes if they at least had chat support.
When corresponding by email, a failure to comprehend my plain English questions, thus giving me non-answers.
Failure to have a staffer monitoring the forum and answering questions with authority.
EXAMPLE TRANSCRIPT RE Pirinform's failure to comprehend my simple questions :
My Question:
Wsmith, Sep 26 17:07:
Don't you at least have chat? Email is not the way to handle support like this.
I have version 1.51.1063
Let's discuss the "Action Tab, in options. At bottom, we see "Recovery" and under that we see a "check box: Restore Folder Structure"
Under that we see available options for securely overwriting a hard disk.
I am very, very confused about this and am highly frustrated by Recuva's very thin online help docs, docs that are significantly out of date, not having telephone support or at least live chat.
I would like to either be pointed to explicit and detailed info on this option, either from your or by pointing me to it on your site.
Recuva may have a lot of positive reviews but I'm less than impressed by what I see with my own eyes.
Please help me to understand my above questions.
Thanks!
Pirinform's Response:
Tova Charles, Sep 29 15:08:
Hi Wade,
We do not offer chat support at this time but would be more than happy to help you via email.
The wiping operation takes a long time to complete because it has to securely overwrite all of your drive's free space using the overwrite method that you've chosen, and in some cases, the wiping operation can take several days.
Please also note that the remaining time is calculated in real-time, rather than a calculation of how much time the entire process will take. For this reason, you may notice that the remaining time will fluctuate throughout the wiping process.
CCleaner was designed to use the following wiping methods:
Simple Overwrite (1 pass): This will overwrite your files once Advanced Overwrite (3 passes): Designed according to Department of Defense 5220.22-M standard. Complex Overwrite (7 passes): National Security Agency standards Very Complex Overwrite (35 passes): Peter Gutmann's method
You can find more information about all of these wiping methods in the table found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_erasure
If you have any additional questions about how to use Recuva I have provided a link to help: https://www.piriform.com/docs/recuva/using-recuva
Please don't hesitate to email me back if you have any questions or concerns.
Regards
Tova
Adequate support is a big part of the picture here and that part is completely lame. Why should I give up any coin for garbage support by a company that cannot even establish a chat support function or really actually help me and not take forever and waste lots of time with failure to comprehend questions.
I'm outta here!