CCleaner

[billyellis]

**Note: I posted this same question in a different forum here:
https://www.techspot.com/vb/topic129560.html
but have gotten no responses, so I am asking it here as well since this is the forum that recommended the program. Mods feel free to delete either one of the threads. I'm just hoping to get a reply from someone, and it does not look like I am going to get one in the other forum.**

I regularly use CCleaner as recommended by the virus/malware removal steps, including the wipe free space feature on occasion to really clean the empty space and theoretically speed up the HD, etc.

However, I recently installed a program called MagicUneraser to try to recover a file I had inadvertently deleted, and after scanning the drive, it found hundreds of thousands of deleted files, and continues to do so after I have run CCleaner with the wipe free space enabled several times. This kind of pisses me off.

Are there any programs out there that actually do what they claim and CLEAN and WIPE the HD free space?? If it is not doing what it says it is doing with that feature, is it really doing what it is supposed to be doing elsewhere?

Are there any undelete programs that have an option to permanently delete found file fragments? MagicUneraser does not offer this feature, so while it can detect files that apparently CCleaner can not, it can not clear them.

Can anyone tell me why CCleaner is recommended in the 8 steps? If I delete a sensitive document or want to control the # of copies of a particular document by making hard copies and deleting the active file on the HD, I would like to feel confident that this is actually being done.

Thanks.

 

[Tedster]

might be a bug in the program. inform the maker. Spybot also has a wipe tool. try that. So does glarysoft registry repair. both are free.

 

[billyellis]

Actually it appears that Spybot no longer has this feature, according to this thread on their user forum:
http://forums.spybot.info/showthread.php?p=238240
from last year. If they have added it back in, I don't see it in my Spybot. However, there is a recommendation in the above thread for a program called AceUtilities, so I will try that one out and see how well it works.

Thanks for the reply.

 

[touch]

Can anyone tell me why CCleaner is recommended in the 8 steps

It is "only" recommended, because it gets the scan tools to run faster. They do not have to scan the files there have been removed

 

[hellokitty[hk]]

Many people go by the philosophy, if a hdd isn't physically broken down, it can still be recovered. Now I don't agree, but the point is writing all freespace to 0's (maybe ones, who cares) is to destroy any viruses pretending to be free space, they are very sneaky.

I saw your old post, but I thought someone more knowledgable would respond.

However, I recently installed a program called MagicUneraser to try to recover a file I had inadvertently deleted, and after scanning the drive, it found hundreds of thousands of deleted files, and continues to do so after I have run CCleaner with the wipe free space enabled several times. This kind of pisses me off.

The point of recovery programs is to FIND ERASED DATA, not to find data that has not physically been deleted. They look through layers of rewrites and find a lot of data that may well have been deleted. Thats where the physically damaging the hdd philosophy comes from.

 

[billyellis]

Hmmm. That is different than my understanding of recovery programs, As I understand it, recovery programs search for intact files that have had their indexing/reference deleted, but have not yet been overwritten by another file. In practice this has been my experience. I have only had success restoring accidentally deleted files when I have done nothing else since and the files are still intact. Of course, I am sure there are more sophisticated programs that can recover files that have been physically erased (e.g. CIA-type espionage stuff), but I doubt this MagicUneraser is that complex, and so I think the problem really is simply that for whatever reason my install of CCleaner is not doing what it is suppoed to be doing (i.e., actually erasing 'deleted' but not overwritten files). It does the other stuff (clearing temp files, etc.) but it is not correctly accessing the HD.

I ran the program (AceUtilities) recommended on the Spybot board and that seemed to do the trick. MagicUneraser no longer finds the files that it was finding before. The only caveat is that doing the full wipe including cluster tips takes a long time (~24 hours). I have no idea what cluster tips are, but if I ever run this in the future I think I will uncheck that option, since that seems to take 3/4 of the time.

Note: the problem may be Spybot itself. AceUtilites recommended shutting down all programs that may restrict access, so I disconnected and shut down as many of my AV/AS programs as I could, incling SD Resident (TeaTimer). I have not tried CCleaner's free space wipe with TeaTimer disabled. Maybe it would work that way...

 

[hellokitty[hk]]

Hmmm. That is different than my understanding of recovery programs, As I understand it, recovery programs search for intact files that have had their indexing/reference deleted, but have not yet been overwritten by another file. In practice this has been my experience. I have only had success restoring accidentally deleted files when I have done nothing else since and the files are still intact.

Actually, I think your right, thats why I waited for someone smarter than myself to respond.