undeleting?

[beavereater]

I was moving 1 PC from my main office to another office...new PC for me. Anyway, I deleted several gigs worth of files I didn't want the next person using the PC to see, just buy using the regular delete...BUT if the next person should want to hash those files up, how much would it take, and would they get complete files!?

[BJ_M]

it would be very very easy to recover them ...

unless they have been written over a few times (many) ...

if nothing else has been written to the hardrive - a 50$ piece of software will retrive. even if reformated ..

[BJ_M]

don't leave porn on your work computer !!


:

[beavereater]

yeah...I am not sure they know what they are doing. It's not "JUST" porn...I have financial statments, not a biggie, but I would rather keep that private. May get back at the PC and try to do something to make it harder for them to retrieve any files...is there anything I can do!?

[BJ_M]

something like East-Tec Eraser will work good

http://www.east-tec.com/

[BJ_M]

i think there are some free solutions also -- other than a low level format (which you dont want to do, unless you want to re-istall everything)

[ViRaL1]

I'd just nuke it and reinstall the OS and Apps. Most people won't bother undoing all that just to recover what MIGHT have been on the drive. If you really want to go through the trouble, some programs are 'available online'.

[fritzi93]

Lots of apps out there that can do the job. Try Hard Disk Scrubber, freeware, from www.summitcn.com. Basically just overwrites free space multiple times, set it for quick, normal, slow and heavy scrub. Should be good enough for most purposes. Good luck.

[thecoalman]

I'd just nuke it and reinstall the OS and Apps. Most people won't bother undoing all that just to recover what MIGHT have been on the drive. If you really want to go through the trouble, some programs are 'available online'.

I recovered the entire "my Documents" folder on a freshly formatted system.... It's not gone until it's overwritten and even then partial content can remain.


Try this one I've used it on a win 98 system and it killed everthing, it overwrites all free space including the unused portion of a cluster. Free to try.... I haven't used it on a XP system but it says it's compatible. http://www.jetico.com/index.htm#/bcwipe3.htm

[ViRaL1]

I wasn't saying that it COULDN'T be recovered, just that your average user wouldn't bother, unless they knew you had something they wanted. If you're worried about it I DO recommend using a utility to overwrite the data, but that depends on how worried you are that someone will go through the trouble of trying to recover it.

[beavereater]

Thanks for the input people. I will be doing something of that sort to kill whatever is on there. I am not that worried about recovered documents, however, there are some NON work related documents on there that has some bank stuff on there. I never expected to give up this PC and get a better one this soon. It all happen in the span of a couple days.

EDIT: What would be the process to get the deleted files, and would they be able to retrieve the entire data?? Or just portions?? Would it be easy!?

[888888]

I have kept this link for a while but never tried or needed to use this software.

http://staff.washington.edu/jdlarios/autoclave/

This should definitely keep everything safe.

[thecoalman]

EDIT: What would be the process to get the deleted files, and would they be able to retrieve the entire data?? Or just portions?? Would it be easy!?

There's literally hundreds of programs for that and they do work. They scan the free space on your drive and detect the deleted files. When you delete a file it doesn't really get deleted until it's overwritten by other data. Deleting a file from from the recycle bin only tells windows that the space is available for use and until another file overwrites that space it's still there.

The app I mentioned above and others like it overwrite the freespace using a system file or something similar. In the case of the one I mentioned it overwrites it many times.

Partial file recovery can take place when part of file hasn't been overwritten. This can happen when the cluster where part of the file resides hasn't been overwritten or onlypart of the cluster has been overwritten. A cluster can only only contain one file or part of a file, if the last part of available space on the cluster isn't used by the file it remains intact. Hence the difference between file size and used space when you click on a file or folder property. You can still retrieve the data from the part of the cluster that wasn't overwritten, whether usable or not remains to be seen.

[beavereater]

thanks!! I am gonna try tomorrow!!