windows 7 - I've run wipe programs, yet recovery programs can still recover my pictures. Why? How do I wipe these pictures?

07
2014-07
  • David

    This question already has an answer here:

    • Answers
  • Matthew Williams

    Securely deleting files gets quite difficult with modern filesystems, since they don't do dumb block allocation like FAT32. Instead, rather sophisticated allocation strategies are used, which has the effect that overwriting an existing file doesn't necessarily mean that you're overwriting the old allocated block, but eventually complete others.

    If you really want to keep your files safe from unauthorized access even after removal, you should consider encrypting your hard disk. There are good and secure programs for this out there, even free (as in freedom) ones, e.g. TrueCrypt.

  • TorpedoBench

    Give CCleaner another try. Under advanced, check off "Wipe free space". This will write over all the free space on your drive with zeroes, which should accomplish what you're trying to do. It will take quite a long time, but should get the job done.

  • Eric Dand

    The Windows built-in Disk Cleanup utility can clear out a surprising amount of space, especially if you go to the "More Options" tab and select "Clean up..." under "System Restore and Shadow Copies".

  • Damon

    Use a utility to write the drive with a pattern regardless of anything. That is write the drive with all 0's, or all 1's, or 01010101, etc. You would need to boot from USB, CD, or other disk to do this unless you know the physical location of the files and could partition around the files and write the pattern to the partition only.


    • Related Question

    windows 7 - How to take an image of an hard drive partition
  • Andreas Bonini

    I'm a reformat freak and I reformat almost every month for one reason or another. I have a small (32 GB) C:\ partition for Windows and some programs and keep everything else on different partitions and/or hard disks that I never format.

    Next time I'm doing this I would like to take an image of C:\ after I installed and configured Windows and my programs so that I can restore it at will, and it must be EXACTLY the same as it was when I took the image.

    Obviously it cannot be done while Windows is running (or at least I think so) since the contents of the hard drive would change. So maybe I should boot Linux from a Live CD or something and use that?

    How would I take and/or restore this image?

    OS is Windows 7


    • Related Answers
  • CGA

    You didn't tell us what operating system you're running. In Windows 7 there is a built in imaging tool. If you're not running 7 there's plenty of third party tools for this, booth free and payed. A good free one is Macrium Reflect. You don't have to reboot when doing the image, only when restoring it, in that case you use a restore CD which you can use the imaging software to create.

  • Nathan Adams

    I would personally recommend using Symantec Ghost Solution Suite 2.5...it does cost a few bucks but it is well worth it.

    If you are technically inclined then I would say use dd (*nix command). Just BE SURE that your if and of are right :). This would be an example:

    dd if=/dev/sdc1 of=/home/user/image.img

    dd would make a sector by sector copy of the hard drive (or partition in the example).

  • Seasoned Advice (cooking)

    Clonezilla and FSArchiver are free. Drive Image is paid-for but lets you backup whilst using the PC and also preserves the disk alignment of a partition if you are restoring to a SSD.