Deletion Allocation

[Jane Bunting]

Hi. I have a question. I deleted some files on my hard drive. Will the information that is left over which would allow you to be able to recover be overwritten first when you get new files or shred freespace, or would you have to completely cover all the freespace. I was wondering because I shredded 10% of my free space with just one pass, it took a half hour just to do that, and also moved Gigabytes of files to the Drive. Then I went to download a program called "Restoration," which can find deleted files without scanning I believe. Nothing showed up. Does this mean they are already gone for good?It's a new hard drive that I''ve only deleted several Gigabytes of things on and still has hundreds of Gigabytes left. Does it delete the freespace with deleted information first or does it not differentiate? Also, would the files be unrecoverable with just one pass and new files being placed in the freespace? Most of them are larger files but some are smaller. For Example, I did a one pass of shredding freespace on a drive with only 15 Gigabytes of freespace, and then when I scanned it with "Recover My Files," there were still some image files that were intact from temp internet files.

 

[Cromewell]

Basically it is impossible to completely erase data on the drive. Using 'shredding' programs make it harder to recover stuff but if anyone is determined enough they could probably get at least something back.

If it's a new drive why do you need to delete everything so thoroughly?

I believe Darik's Boot and Nuke is about as permanently gone as you can do but it wipes absolutely everything.

 

[fmw]

Deleting files with your operating system doesn't erase anything. It simply removes the directory entries and frees up the disk space. However, it is very possible to remove all traces of files completely. It involves writing zeros or other data in the space formerly occupied by the files after the file directory entries have been erased. It is time consuming. By that I mean the software operates very slowly. What you recover, if you try to recover it won't be the original file. It will be just a series of zeros. That gets the job done.

 

[Jane Bunting]

2 questions that need answered here.

1. Say I have a 500GB drive with 10 GB of files on it. If I delete those files, then shred 10% of the freespace and add another 30 GB of files on the drive. Will the deleted information be overwritten?

2. I searched for the deleted files with a program called "Restoration," after overwriting some of the freespace and there were no results. Is that a reliable program to use though?