Comments on: How to Make Sure Your Deleted Files Are Completely Erased

By: Joe

Joe — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 17:45:48 +0000

The idea here is try to make it impossible to be able to recover the data. Even when you write over a bit on a disk, if you did enough analysis on the drive, you could find a very small difference because data was once there and then you could reconstruct the data by looking at these differences and determining what the bit used to read. It would take special tools since the difference is smaller then what normally would be detected. This is why they are overwriting three times. It makes it more difficult to reconstruct but I would guess still not impossible but out of reach for 99.9 percent of people to do. Think about some of the hard drives they recovered from the space shuttle that went down. These drives were toast – burned to a crisp. They still recovered a large amount of the data by doing the same thing. if you filled your hard drive a couple times, you could do the same thing, yes I think so. I started this command on a terabyte drive, trying to erase one directory that had about 220 gig in it.. its been running for a week now – still on the first pass. sucks. Simply writing 220 gig to that directory would not have wrote over the old data – so I would of had to write to the entire disk, But I could have done this three times by now at least. I’m not sure if I should blame the command or the external drive (that I want to return because it has problems which is why I am trying to erase the backup of my system in the first place). Hope this helps..if not you, someone else

By: Brent Trahan

Brent Trahan — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 19:11:47 +0000

What happens when you delete the folder? Do any errors or messages pop-up?

By: Roy

Roy — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 17:01:32 +0000

Thanks for the effort in publishing this for the benefit of others. I tried it too but the specific folder which i typed still contains the files which were deleted a year ago. This is really stunning. It sums up to about 1.4GB of my disk space. Im using vista. How can i get rid of this files which have already been deleted so long ago?

Regards,
Roy.

By: shwet

shwet — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 10:48:50 +0000

Very useful article. For assurance you have erased your data, you need drive wipe tools because normal formatting doesn’t delete data complete or zero the data. These utilities rewrite the data so that it cldn’t be recoverable.

Thanks

By: elie

elie — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 18:43:54 +0000

Will it be easier to just fill up the whole hardrive with a large file (like a movie) and erase it ?
Just curious, why would this Cypher function need to erase available space on the hardrive 3 times? Why 1 is not enough? DIGITS are either 1 or 0 !
Any help is welcomed !

By: Brent Trahan

Brent Trahan — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:02:16 +0000

None that I know of. The amount of time it takes depends on the size and speed of your hard drive.

By: Al Sargent

Al Sargent — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 17:40:16 +0000

Thanks for this tip.

My question is this: I’m running cipher /w as I write this. It’s been running for over ten hours, and I have no idea how long it will take to finish. Are there any rules of thumb for how long a typical PC will take to clear out one gig of disk space?

By: VirkStar

VirkStar — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 04:16:04 +0000

very usefull, i always wondered how to do that