just curious, if i was to do a simple wipe on 3 different occasions, is this the same as doing 1 DOD , -M (3 passes)

i'm thinking yes... like wiping a table 3 times?

If you really want secure deletion you'll need Recuva for the job. It has a build-in eraser: http://docs.piriform.com/recuva/technical-...e-file-deletion

The link also answers the question about what CCleaner's secure deletion is.

No. Secure wiping algorithms like DOD specs use multiple passes with differing byte patterns - a prescribed sequence to give the best chance of masking the previously stored bytes.

Three 1-pass wipes would use the same pattern. Unless of course the particular software uses a random pattern . Which presumably even then wouldn't be as effective as doing a single predefined DOD 3-pass in the first place.

So ... to use the table analogy ... it's like wiping it once left to right, once up and down and once diagonally ... instead of doing three times left to right


? Recuva offers the same secure wiping patterns as CCleaner.

I'm sorry. That's not how I read the information. A bit too fast there...

Nay worries At first I thought it odd that recuva offered secure deletion ... but of course as well as the files you could wipe with ccleaner, recuva additionally allows you to wipe "good" but deleted files that you wouldn't be able to access with ccleaner ... effectively a 'selective free space wipe'. But the actual algorithms used seem to be the same.