Has anyone ever used Eraser?

[RetroJay]

Hi all.

I wish to pick your brains.

The other day I made a silly error and deleted a file I most certainly needed.
My next door neighbour suggested that I use 'Pandora Recovery' as he had used it before and retrieved a deleted file.
I did this and managed to get the file back by copying it to my flash drive.

However I was astounded by the amount of deleted material that was there.
Surely this must have an impact in some way to system performance having all this shite floating around in the depths of the HDD.

So I started some research and found a few programs which supposedly wipes all the deleted material.
One program that kept getting mentioned over others was 'Eraser'.

My question is. Has anyone used this kind of software and does it work?

I don't want to do anything until I have other peoples views on this.

Many thanks.
Jay.

[Calin Leafshade]

When an OS deletes a file it does not actually erase the block all it does is flag the block as "overwriteable" which tells the OS that it can overwrite this block with new data if it needs to.

This is a time saving mechanism which means it doesnt have to erase every tiny byte on the drive.

Ever done a quick format? That is exactly the same principle except it flags *all* the sectors as overwriteable.

So this doesnt impact performance and infact increases the speed at which the OS can delete files.

The only negative side effect of this is that sensitive data can be recovered when the user thought they had 'deleted' it.

So unless you are deleting data that you dont want anyone to find then you dont need to use tools like eraser.

[monkey0506]

Even if the sector is overwritten it is still theoretically possible to recover some or all of the data of previous write operations. In practice there hasn't been sufficient evidence to fully support the theory, but if only some of the sectors are overwritten then the remaining sectors would still be considered recoverable.

I've never used this "Eraser" program, but I have used Piriform's CCleaner as well as their Recuva program. CCleaner would be comparable to Eraser in that it overwrites the sectors of the files it removes. You can with this program utilize the Gutmann method of removing the files which overwrites the sectors using 35 different overwriting patterns. This would presumably be enough to even remove the theoretical chance of recovering the data.

CCleaner also allows you to overwrite the "blank" sectors of your HDD which means that you can "clean up" the sectors which have only had their header information deleted. This can be very time consuming, but if you're concerned about something you might have deleted, this would be the way to ensure it won't come back.

The Recuva program I mentioned would be comparable to the Pandora Recovery program in that it can help you recover existing data from sectors of the HDD which have no header information and are therefore indicated as being "blank" or "overwritable".

The reason I'm suggesting Piriform's programs is because I've personally used them before, and when I had to recover my mom's boyfriend's computer from about 50 viruses (he had files he did not want to lose, so a format was sadly out), the staff of their forums was a great help to me.

[RetroJay]

Hi Calin and Monkey.

Thank you very much for your replies.
I don't have any sensitive material to worry about so I think I will just leave things as they are.

I was just staggered at how much crap is there that usualy you wouldn't see.
Anyway I always keep my computers till they die and then before disposal tap the HDD afew times with a 20 lb sledge hammer.

I have made a note of the programs, Monkey, as they one day may be usefull.

Once again Thank you.
Jay

[Ryan Timothy B]

Actually, I hear this is how they bust most people with the 'deleted' child porn on their hard drive.

I hope this isn't your case, Jay. 

[RetroJay]

Actually, I hear this is how they bust most people with the 'deleted' child porn on their hard drive.

I hope this isn't your case, Jay. 

Hi Ryan.

I understand that what you have said is a joke.
However I am still slightly offended.
I am NOT a sick piece of shit that clings to the arse of society.

Jay.

[blueskirt]

Yeah, that thing can be a lifesaver. I accidentally deleted my bookmark file and overwrote my backup bookmark file last month, I was pretty sure I would waste my week-end re-finding the hundred of bookmarks I collected over the years but I suddenly remembered I could undelete the original file. There was much rejoicing that night.

[Ryan Timothy B]

I understand that what you have said is a joke.
However I am still slightly offended.
I am NOT a sick piece of shit that clings to the arse of society.

My god boy. Relax a little and take a damn joke.  Don't walk around with a bread stick up your arse.
I'd love to say "No offense" or "I'm sorry", but no, this is the internet.  Learn to ignore it or laugh at it.  That sentence itself wouldn't have bothered me whatsoever.


I actually mentioned that little tidbit because I kept hearing on the radio a few years ago "so and so got arrested once police recovered deleted child porn on their computer" and I honestly thought it meant they were dumb enough to leave it in the recycling bin. Until a friend of mine told me about it only deleting the sector locations on the index of the hard drive not the individual bytes themselves.

[Calin Leafshade]

Jesus Ryan, get your fucking facts straights! It's stuff like this that really pisses me off!

...A bread stick would obviously go soft and bend..

[Ryan Timothy B]

Calin,

Now I understand what you have said is a joke.
However I'm still slightly offended that you think an anus is moist enough to soften an italian made bread stick!
Italian bread sticks are NOT sick pieces of soft bread that cling to the moist arse of society.




Oh wait.. I forgot the smiley. 

[RetroJay]

Very funny. LOL

Ok. So the other night I must have had a humour breakdown. (happens every now and then).
In my defence though I found the rest of this hillarious.
Also I am glad that you liked my quote enough to use it in your own message.

Hope we can all be friends again.
Jay.

[monkey0506]

As an interesting happenstance, I blame it all on you Jay.

Oh, so now you want to know what you're being accused of?

AGS crashed on me yesterday..I'm not sure if this was just because of my computer..AGS..the Lua plugin..or..a fluctuation in the probability fields..but my project's CRM file got totally and utterly corrupted. I say that to mean not only would AGS not load it..but the file could not be deleted. Windows was actually giving me a Data Error: Cyclic redundancy check.

Well..I decided to reboot and see what happened. Now the entire secondary drive was unreadable. I tried rebooting after disconnecting the secondary drive..and..now the primary drive wasn't loading right.

Ah, what the heck. I've been meaning to format the Windows drive anyway. Well, it's completely unrelated, but my DVD drive kept failing to load the Windows Setup due to a SESSION 3 INITIALIZATION failure. Using a paperclip I got my CD-RW drive open so I could run Windows Setup. Once I got Windows successfully reinstalled on the primary drive, I decided to reconnect the secondary drive.

Now Windows got stuck in a loop whilst trying to boot and wouldn't make it past the boot-loading screen..AWESOME.

So I boot back into Windows Setup and saying to myself through gritted teeth that enough is enough..delete the partition on my secondary drive. My secondary drive which has all of my AGS development, all of my pictures, all of my music, all of my games, all of my..everything.

That allowed Windows to boot-up (finally). So then I did a quick format on the drive (which actually isn't that quick on a 300 GB SATA drive being accessed through an IDE converter (my motherboard doesn't have SATA ports)). After all of that, I am now using Recuva to "recuva" approximately 63 thousand files.

A 19 hour estimate before I left for work this morning now reads, after approximately 13 hours including travel time, 12 hours. Sweet.

Edit: And for those of you saying I need to make more regular backups..well..touche.