I read about a case where some college professor robbed banks and printed off things to hand to the clerks that read “empty the cash register or I will blow your fuckin head off”(or something to that effect). The cops went on his comp and found the documents he used, even though he deleted them.
My understanding of the computer deleting files is like, it marks the file as deleted, it is still there, but not accessable. But if you install something else, there is a chance that that info will overwrite the deleted stuff. Why is it like this? Would it take to long do actually wipe the info from the comp? If you defrag often, is there a better chance that that info will be overwritten, or will it all get pushed to the back? Is there a way to actually wipe the info without wiping everything? And if so, how? Just wondering.
Thanks,
For the computer to wipe it clean, it needs to put something over it. The process of putting something over that space will always take longer than simply marking that space as open.
Because it’s fast and easy. Why make the hard drive work harder going over deleted data with something else, even gibberish? Again, it’s working harder, and longer, than simply marking that space as open.
That, I don’t know about. If I had to guess, however, I’d say it has a better chance of getting gumbled up and placed out of order, but parts of it (If not all of it) will remain.
If you’re really concerned about this issue, you can either buy or download for free a variety of programs that will accomplish this.
I’d link to one, but I’ve never felt the need, or had that level of paranoia.
lol, no paranoia, just wonder.
Off the top of my head, the only way to completely remove the old files from a hard drive is to do a low level format, which means writing all zeros to your hard drive, which means losing [i[everything* on it, including the operating system.
that should be everything. Yeah, preview is my friend.
that’s because a normal delete operation on a computer does not actually delete the data present on the hard-drive. it just deletes the link from the filename to the place where the data is stored.
so let’s say you had a file called xash.txt that took positions 50 upto 60 on the hdd. ( i could give it to you in computer terms but that might confuse you, so i’m just using lay person terms here ) so positions 50 upto 60 on the hard drive contain the actual data of xash.txt , which might include any sort of text, let’s assume a few phone numbers. so the filename xash.txt links to the positions 50 to 60, which contain the said phone numbers. when you delete xash.txt from your computer, it actually only deletes the link from xash.txt to positions 50 to 60, so after a delete , the positions 50 to 60 still contain the phone numbers, but there’s no file linking to it, so a common user cannot access the data, but other file utilities would easily be able to read off positions 50 to 60 and read the phone numbers.
but now positions 50 to 60 are marked as free, so they still contain the phone numbers but cannot be accessed by a normal user since xash.txt no longer exists. since positions 50 to 60 are marked as free, any file that is created or modified at a later time can decide to use positions 50 to 60 to store it’s own data. so let’s say you make a new file called kgriffey79.txt and it decides to use positions 45 to 55 ( actually there’s an algorithm for how this is decided, which we will not get into right yet ), so now it overwrites positions 50 to 55 of our phone numbers. but positions 56 to 60 still contain phone numbers which can be read by the cops using disk utilities.
a low-level format, as pointed out earlier, will erase everything.
Okay, so its a text file. Instead of deleting the file, suppose we do a “Select All” and just delete the text, leaving the file name intact. Now what? Is the supposedly deleted text still lurking about on the hard drive?
If you are running Microsoft Windows (and really are that paranoid) you might be interested in the information on this web page: Microsoft’s Really Hidden Files v2.1.
just a WAG
what you’ve done is this: you replaced the first part of the file with your ‘empty’ file. (example from Xash: postitions 50-51) the rest of the old file (positions 52-60)is still there. as long as it’s not overwritten, it will remain.
I believe you are correct.
The simple matter is - if you want to hide something, use PGP Disk. Simple, fast, brainless to use. And the police will be spending some decades cracking it, unless they can convince the NSA that your escapades are worthy of their efforts and attention.
Here’s a handy freeware tool to erase files. It adds a new right-click option to Windows Explorer.
–Nut
ObiWan said:
I looked at the referenced page and the author seems a might paranoid. The IE5 files he referred to really are well hidden (I don’t use Outlook or FastFind so I can’t comment on files relating to them) and he has an interesting explanation of that. He does neglect to mention that they’re only hidden from Explorer. If you use a DOS window or any other file management program – I’m using PowerDesk – they’re perfectly visible.
That being said, the IE5 files in question are simply the browser cache and browser history. I can’t see that there is anything sinister going on in them. There are perfectly valid reasons why those files are kept. The reason you can’t delete (all of) them is that IE5 is at least partially active at all times, and so is using them – especially if you have the browser open and looking at his web page while you try do it. You can however wipe the contents just by using the Clear History and Clear Cache buttons under IE5’s Internet Options. Doing this deletes many of the files and writes blanks over entries in the INDEX.DAT files.
I’m speculating here but I suspect that similar ideas apply to the Outlook files. For instance, I use Netscape for my mail and if I use another program to open the files in which it actually stores the messages, I can see messages that I deleted long ago. The reason for that is – relating back to the original thread of the discussion – that it doesn’t create a separate file for each message. It creates a file for each folder and puts all the messages in that one file. When I delete a message through Communicator, the space it was using in the file is marked as available for reuse but for efficiency’s sake, the whole file is not re-written. If I really want to get rid of those old messages, I can use Communicator’s Compact Folders command and it will re-write the files, removing the deleted messages. Again, I don’t use Outlook but I’d guess that it uses similar methods and has a command similar to Compact Folders.
Try running Norton Utilities defragger SpeedDisk (I’m sure there are others that can do this as well) after you’ve deleted your file(s) and select the option Wipe Free Space with ‘Government Wipe’. Do this three times, then hope the government isn’t interested in your hard drive:)