How do I go about this? Everything in Recuva is geared toward recovery. It lists half a million files that are partially recoverable, totally lost, or fully recoverable. As far as I'm concerned, they're dead files. Can I delete them? (At least the red marked ones.)

In another thread, Andavari mentioned that he had securely deleted some files using Recuva -- so there must be a way. Maybe he'll respond.

Exactly. I remember reading that post. I was hoping he'd reply.

right-click the files and choose secure delete.

Well, yes, it is primarily a recovery utility.


That's a huge amount (I usually manage about 12k). Did you run a deep scan to get this number, or the standard scan?


Yes and no. Well, really no, but as near as makes no difference. A file can never be deleted. A virgin disc will have (presumably) a uniform magnetic pattern on its read/write surfaces. Once data is written then that's it, the surface can never be restored to its previous unsullied condition. What CC, Recuva, and anything else can do is overwrite the data. This overwritten stuff can always be recovered, but will be of no use or importance to anyone. If you use Recuva to overwrite the data you will end up (if Recuva ever ends) with the same list of half a million files, but with nothing of value in them.

There are diskwashers around that will erase the unused portions of a disk, by which I mean the areas not currently occupied by live files. In general they do exactly what Recuva does, but overwrite the entire not-live disk area with blocks of zeroes, or random data. They may also remove filename entries from the MFT, which Recuva doesn't do, so they will give an impression of having cleaned the disk but that is false, in fact the reverse, as they have contaminated the entire surface of the disk with their duff data.

It's inevitable that data gets written to disks, so it's not really worth getting too worried about it. If we didn't have Recuva (or similar utilities, if there are any) then we wouldn't be able to see these lost souls. If you want to look clean, then a diskwasher may help. Rgds.

There were a lot so I said half a million. I tend to exaggerate in situations like this. If there's an entry that gives the number, I didn't see it.

Thanks for the info. Sounds like I don't need to worry about them. I never ran Recuva before and was curious.

Hi Guys,
Yes,Andavari's comment sure piqued my interest.
Also the fact that JDPower stated the other day to go ahead and use Recuva to overwrite deleted files.
That being said I went to //www.recuva.com tonight and downloaded the newest version 1.13.304.
Wow!!! What great improvements have been made to make it easier to use by the average PC user.
I used all of the defaults in the wizard except I specified Other show all files.
It took only a couple of minutes to scan and analyze and came up with approx. 50,000 deleted files.
I then checked the box at the top left next to Filename.This caused all the files to be checked marked.
I then right clicked in the body of the listing and selected Secure Delete Checked.
It then took approx. 30 mins to Securely Delete at the default 1 overwrite to overwrite approx. 48,000
files. This was speedy compared with what I thought it would take.
Now,I can rest assured that all previous data other than filenames is unavailable for malicious use or accidental viewing.

I put a lot of value in Andavari and JDPowers comments.
davey
P.S. Augeas Thank You for all your testing and valuable replies regarding Recuva,