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Guides for file destruction or recovery added

4 February 2009 9:50 by James "Dela" Delahunty | 4 comments

We have recently added quite a few new guides and articles to the site as some of you may have noticed. Three of these new additions cover maintaining privacy and recovering accidentally deleted files. We all use the Internet and many of us share computers, and so we like to keep our material private whether or personal reasons, or business reasons. I'm sure we have all accidentally deleted something important too once and went into a panic about it.

Also, many of us have, by now, sold on an older computer when upgrading, usually with the operating system still intact. So the following three guides can help pretty much anybody to give a quick look over, or recommend to someone on the forum later on.

How to Securely Delete Files
This article uses a great freeware product many of you are aware of called Eraser. Eraser has the ability to make data unrecoverable (or at least unrecoverable by the standards of all publicly known recovery methods). This can be useful if you are selling your computer or have documents that are no use to you anymore, but still contain sensitive data. Additionally, this article also covers overwriting the free space of a drive to make previously deleted files unrecoverable too. It's a useful tool and a quick read.

Clear Private and Temp Data Quickly and Safely
This guide just walks quickly through CCleaner for anyone who hasn't used it, showing how to use its secure deletion features to permanently remove records of your historical use of your computer. Again this is a great product to use if you are using a shared computer, or if you are selling it. It's also useful to have this (free) product installed just to keep your hard drive uncluttered by temporary files and other things that can accumulate fast.

How to Recover Deleted Files
This guide uses the program Recuva to walk through recovery of files you may have accidentally deleted. There are other very useful products such as Activ@ Undelete that we had better results with while testing, but Recuva is 100% free and you can't beat that. A quick look over this guide is recommended to anybody who has a lot of valuable files stored, but it is also something good to have installed as a "just in case" measure.

Hopefully these will be useful to some of you.

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OneMember (AfterDawn Addict) 4 February 2009 10:48
Will that Eraser guide get friend from Darik's Boot and Nuke in future? EDIT: just a hint. [ + quote] This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 4 February 2009 10:50
Dela (Staff Member) 4 February 2009 10:51
@OneMember, Actually yes :-) Some people on the Finnish version of AfterDawn asked for it already when a translated version of the Eraser guide was added, so looks like brilliant minds think alike ;-) [ + quote]
scorpNZ (Senior Member) 5 February 2009 18:04
The only issue with recuva & most other recovery software is if you deleted some data before you installed it then in all likely hood you'll overwrite the data you're trying to get back,don't panic undelete plus (it's free) has two versions an install type & non install which can run from a separate partition or perhaps even a dvd not that i've tried it, there's also pandora recovery (again another freebie)tho that's an install type.Another good recovery agent although not free & most won't want to know is "Nortons protected recycle bin" say what you like about symantec software but make sure you base it on fact & not the all too familiar sheep talk,unlike recuva etc norton's protected when setup "correctly" lets you keep deleted data for any number of days before being overwritten,that said your best defence is to use a RW or RAM disk or a spare partition to save any data your about to delete just in case Undelete has good reviews from pc world,softpedia,i can certainly vouch for it as i can for recuva http://www.undelete-plus.com/ http://www.pandorarecovery.com/ [ + quote]
champman (Newbie) 6 February 2009 21:40
Thanks for the new item on the free Eraser, I've been using it for the past couple of days & its now my main secure eraser of choice as I was using Internet History Eraser (you have to pay for that). The scheduler is neat and I especially like the accurate timeleft info and end report. You can use this on your normal under-powered office PC as it doesn't require much processing, even on the 35 pass Gutmann. The 7-pass should be enough for most in general. And is the erase free space of this app one of the most secure you can get for free in terms of simplicity, so I can sell my PC ? [ + quote]