Drive wipe?

Quasar

Quick question. I run ccleaner regularly on both my lappies (the old one is really slow), and noticed there's a drive wipe facility. Does that clean all programs or just documents etc? Just curious as to what it does exacly, in case I might find it useful in future.

RobTang

Neither, it "cleans" the free space of your drive to make any deleted files harder to recover

Quasar

RobTang wrote: »

Neither, it "cleans" the free space of your drive to make any deleted files harder to recover

Oh. I thought it freed space. Thanks for your reply.

Ximian

This should help: http://www.piriform.com/docs/ccleaner/using-ccleaner/wiping-free-disk-space

closed

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/2436849

IcyEars

Hiya Q, long time no type! How goes it.

It actually will either clean the free space OR wipe the partition completely using multi-pass methods (i.e. it writes a load of gobbledy-gook again and again) to make it harder for previously stored data to be reconstructed (i.e. if you sold it and the buyer was a bit dodge they couldn't potentially reconstruct the data you had on the drive previously).

It doesn't free space but it does make sure the free-space you have is actually free and doesn't hold echoes of previously stored data.

If you did sell it though there are better tools out there for wiping a disk or taking it out and physically destroying it would also do the job!

Lum

To be honest the whole multi-pass wipe thing is worthless. A single pass is fine unless you're up to something so naughty that it would be worth spending literally millions of pounds to investigate the data, and even then you probably won't get much of use.

So basically, unless that hard drive happened to belong to Bernard Madoff or Gary Glitter, just do a single pass wipe and you're done.

Quasar

IcyEars wrote: »

Hiya Q, long time no type! How goes it.

It actually will either clean the free space OR wipe the partition completely using multi-pass methods (i.e. it writes a load of gobbledy-gook again and again) to make it harder for previously stored data to be reconstructed (i.e. if you sold it and the buyer was a bit dodge they couldn't potentially reconstruct the data you had on the drive previously).

It doesn't free space but it does make sure the free-space you have is actually free and doesn't hold echoes of previously stored data.

If you did sell it though there are better tools out there for wiping a disk or taking it out and physically destroying it would also do the job!

I'm fine ta, IcyEars (they must have been in recent weather!). I hope you and yours are fine too.

I was just asking out of curiosity mostly, as I do not sell my lappies. I have three of the four I've ever owned (one of them runs W98 and still going well, lol, although I don't connect it to the internet anymore). The fourth was so far gone that I just took out the hard drive and and dumped in the electronic recycling centre nearby.