Borg, when you defragment data only data that is over written is the area where the fragmented source data ends up, the location of the source data further up the surface of the drive is still there... open for all to see. Now that could be program or OS binary files or it could be private personal data or previously deleted data... It is NOT harsh in any way for magentic media for it to be overwritten! It is designed to be overwritten! In fact it is good for hard drives to periodically written to, to refresh the magnetised paterns on the disks! Defragmentaion just makes it impossible for undelete tools to easily recover complete files because of the re-organisation of the files on the disk surface but areas unwritten remain and the data still exists there. You need to defragment then wipe free space and cluster tips.Or just wipe clear space and cluster tips LOL.

Borg,

Your hacker friend shouldn't give up his day job, I tried what you said you and your hacker say you've done and was able to recover files using forensic software. The only way you could prevent any files deleted using your method would be to encrypt them first, so that any recovered files would be worthless, your method is flawed in many ways and very time consuming. In fairness to your hacker, I work in computer security and my recovery tools are industrial strength, not normally available to the general public which probably gave me a bit of an edge ... Interesting comment though. Cheers.

TK, Borg is correct, you conveniently did not comment on the DVD being used to overlap the deleted sections of the sectors on the HD. I have done same things like Borg and there are no traces what so ever.
Microsoft OSs do not use new sectors after the deletion, they do overlap on the old data and re-use the deleted sectors first.

Maria, DVD files are not magic, again that only potentially erases part of the hard drive surface the rest remains if fragmented files parts were in the last 80% of the drive surface and delete them, the data remains in the last 80% of the drive... defragment the drive and any remaining fragmented files will be moved towards the front of the drive and when you copy over with a DVD VOB file it will normally use the first unallocated blocks and completely miss the defragmented data blocks previous locations and the deleted data remaining in the last 80% of the drive I know as I am aware what defragmentation does and what writing a small file like a 1GB DVD VOB file does... you need to write many coppies of the VOB file to fill up all the unallocated space and even then some data could leak in cluster tip slack space. That is why a dedicated tool like Heidi.ie Eraser will do that and wipe cluster tips. No need to shuffle files about with a defrag and part wipe part of the HD surface redundantly copying VOB files then deleting them leaving evidence of pirate movie trading activities on the HD. (deleted riiped DVD files)

Try using a real defragmenter and not the GUI-less microsoft one so you can see where a files data is scattered around a drive then delete/defrag and copy your VOB files and notice that nothing written to the clusters that had data in prior to the deletion and defragmentation. Then use something like HxD to load the raw HD contents and look at the untouched clusters and there is the original data.

I suggest both you and Borg don't set yourself up as profesional data storage device sanitisers as your methods leave data retrievable using very basic forensic methods.

Caro,
Hi, once the data is erased by super eraser, it will be lost forever, can't be recovered by any software.

Bryan, secret recovery software's used by agencys can easily recover even several times erased drives.
How to find such software's ?

Duncan,

http://www.accessdata.com

Dear Kandilce,
You can try it later or just send an email to support@doyourdata.com, they will help you solve your issue.

Glen C, haha yeah

MikeR,

C-Cleaner does not erase individual files or folders, and that's one of its main drawbacks, as it would be a natural thing for it to do. It erases some pre-determined files and folders created by Windows, and specific application software, which may contain identifying personal information while not being necessary for computer operation. It also erases free space on a disk or partition, or the whole partition for that matter.There is no way in C-Cleaner, for instance, to select a Word document you have created, and erase it securely.

It is also worth noting that no software can boast of securely erasing individual files or folders with absolute certainty. There are many cases in which parts of the file, or copies of it, would still remain on the disk (and therefore be susceptible to forensic attack), because the erasing software does not know where they might be.

The only way to be sure that sensitive information is erased is to erase the whole partition or disk, or to erase the free space on that partition or disk. Or to lose the password of an encrypted volume.

So, although using a piece of software such as this one immediately after creating a file might give some level of reassurance, there is an element of snake oil associated with all programs which pretend to securely erase individual documents created by the user.

Chériou: Superb post -- and I'm happy to stand corrected. Thanks for taking the trouble to set the record straight.

MikeR,

You're welcome. I'm myself an old-time user of C-Cleaner, and was convinced it could erase individual files, until I looked for the function... and failed to find it.

Steffo, that's not the ONLY way, but generally speaking it is almost the quickest way to make it difficult to retrieve data... but not always impossible unless the platters are microscopically shredded so no data segments could be retrieved. In which case it'll probably take significant time to shred a drive that far. On modern drives one overwrite of random data followed by numerous holes drilled through the platters should prevent labratory condition data recovery for the forseable future with drives that use perpendicular recording techniques. But single pass random data on same perpendicular recorded drive is the modern gold standard for drive sanitation for subsiquent re-use provided no sectors have ever been remapped since the faulty sectors that were taken out of use have become inaccessible by the firmware and not overwritable so could contain private data. Old fashioned low capacity drives still need multiple passes of random data to sanitise but none need the 35 pass method as most of the recording methods those 35 passes were designed to disrupt have not been in use for several decades!

Dear Detenova,
Thanks for your advice. Will add this feature in next version.

Detenova, doesn't it even do that? Open source Heidie.ie Eraser https://eraser.heidi.ie/ does that and free space with cluster tips and userdefinable as well as classic erasure schemes and maybe more as I didn't realise it's back in active development and I am using a relatively ancient version 5.8.4 from several years ago (2007) without significant issues in 32 bit Vista!

Bryan, I have a question does DYD Super Eraser fully disable ALL write caches, including on drives hardware cache and windows write cache, when performing the erase writes to ensure the patterns all get written to the disk surface before the next passes patterns writes are made?

TK,
yes

Bryan, Thank you