How many times does data have to be overwriten on a hard drive to make deleted files more difficult to recover?
I read somewhere that emptying the recycle bin is not very effective at preventing people from recovering deleted items since windows just mark the file as deleted, and the space can be used by other data. The deleted data exist until it is overwritten by new files.
Well, data is never really lost. If a file is deleted, why can you recover it by doing System Restore? If thats possible, then a file always exist. Thats the way I see it. I see it that files never delete. Even when you put a new operating system on your pc, the old partition of the hard disk is put into a file that has an extension of .old (I think) and still..The files are still there.
I would say overwriting it with junk atleast 7 times. On Windows' NTFS a deleted file gets marked as deleted, so it can be overwritten, but it's still there. Linux overwrites this with zeros although it can be still recovered.
If you want to overwrite your HDD multiple times, you should try DBan. If you're on Linux use the shred command.
It's worth mentioning that Spybot also has a file shredder. I'm not sure how well it works, though, as I've never really been too concerned about COMPLETELY erasing anything. It may be worth looking into if you already use that tool.
I cleared 30 gigs off my computer by deleting all the contents of C:\Windows\Temp
There was stuff in there from 2007. Lol. You could also delete old system restore's.
I found a program called Eraser for wiping freespace and files to securely wipe them. Link:: http://eraser.heidi.ie/index.php It seems to work pretty well.
i actually looked this up before because i was curious as well, all the programs that the government uses to permanently removed their data and make it unrecoverable is overwritten 7 times, so if thats how many times the government says is secure than i would do it 7 times 🙂 if you google this you will actually find some eraser programs government certified 🙂
