Obviously if it is a lab specialising in data recovery it might be a different matter though - who knows. I've gone over some drives that were wiped with 3 passes as an experiment with recovery software and nothing at all shows. Usually use 3 passes as there was a balance between time/security and 2-3 hours was just about ok. Used to use DBAN for an organisation that upcycles computers. I've read Xenopeek and Karlchen and a few other threads explaining about why data cleansing is essentially impossible without destroying ALL the data on a drive. Get back to you soon.Īnyhow - was very impressed with R-Linux/ I used to use 'file shredders' in Windows that Windows recovery software wasn't able to recover (a bit vague I know but I was using some licensed recovery stuff as well as free apps that worked quite well) so will try another experiment when I get some time just using Nemo file shredder or other GUI and CLI file shredding commands just to see if they also are a bit useless or not. I ran Bleachbit (root) again and R-Linux again and a few of the files that were recoverable are now not recoverable, but some are.ĭon't waste your time trying to 'hide' stuff on your spinny hdd. Reason I'm not being specific with numbers is that there were way too many files to 'recover' and test and this was mainly to see if trying to wipe free space is worth your time. Thousands of file names are still available to see. Some files are named a certain mp3 or mp4 but play another one. Some files are semi recoverable (as in the header seems to be intact so still plays a few minutes) There are several files that are fully recoverable. I was looking at mainly video and music files as it doesn't seem worth going any further for text based files judging by the results. Then R-Linux was used from Software Manager which is the latest version anyway (21) on that partition using the medium scan speed which took another 3.5 hours. There aren't many/any options on passes etc. It took approx 2.5 hours for Bleachbit to wipe it. Using Bleachbit (root) 2.0 (from Software Manager) on Mint 19.3 and also 4.4 downloaded as. The partition is 2.1 TB of which 1.6TB is free and targetted for 'wiping'.
I wiped the free space on one partition of a non-system (spinny) hdd that has 2 partitions, then tried to recover some data with R-Linux. The only GUI app I could find to do this, or at least claim to do this, was Bleachbit (root). This is different from wiping the hard drive completely which is probably more reliable, although a hammer/drill would be preferable. I thought I'd do some experimenting on wiping/shredding free space.