Run Recuva, a free tool that recovers deleted files from your hard drive

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That's how they get you!

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I use this. It'll overwrite the free space on your drive. It doesn't take very long on my small sdd, but hdd will take a bit longer.
However, I haven't checked if the data is actually overwritten.
Very good program to have.

Mother.
Fucking
DBAN.

Seriously, if you need a disk wiped, set it to 10+ passes, and it'll murderise every last bit/byte.

Wont that take like 2 weeks to complete on a normal HDD though?

Its easier to smash it with a hammer.

fag

i have a tiny hardrive (60 gigs) bleaching takes like 20 mins for me

bleachbit is what shillary used on her email server. And they got all those emails back

it ain't that great an app, user

wtf, thats' smaller that most usb keys now a days. what the fuck can you put on that?
HAHA

you must be extra paranoid and use some sorta boot to disk app.

If hard drives have limited data storage capacity then how can deleted files be recovered? That would mean that old data exists in the same space as current data, meaning there is, in fact, no storage limitations on a drive.

I generally like to run Recuva on any drives I buy used, just to see what was there from before.

I haven't won anything yet, but I found a series of locally-made radio show segments, thought about posting it on /christian/.

thats funny because i put all my stuff on usb sticks

i only use the essentials and i use qubes os so yeah some people call me paranoid

I wish I had a qt like this.


has anyone even gotten a gf from imageboards?

Not all of them :^)

it's been a while since i read shit about it but i think it goes something like this:


I very vaguely remember shit pertaining particularly to Windows but I remember fucking around with EnCase which is a forensics suite and NTFS's master file table and other shit kept oodles of information fragments around. Enough to easily be like "oh this guy had CP on his computer at some point" even if it's been long deleted. There's also forensic file carving which predicts a file's contents based on common identifiable data (like headers and footers). I think all recovery software does is looks for data similar to how a file carver does and marks the sectors as in-use when you recover it. This is also why it can detect files but may mark them as unrecoverable, it has metadata on the file (file name, date modified, what file type it is) but the file's contents are partially overwritten. Same thing with carvers. When I was fucking around with them a lot of time I was only able to carve out bits and pieces of files.

Some other shit: Because of sectors being marked as "free" (but data not being overwritten), a file might actually occupy many different areas on the hard drive. I believe "virtual runs" mark each seperate area occupied and there's a term for what sectors are actually occupied that I forget.

Anyways, people circumvent shit like this is:
- keep hard drive nearly full so shit is constantly getting overwritten (kind of a shitty method)
- "zero" your hard drive. This means force overwriting all sectors on the disk with a bunch of zeros or better yet random data (like from Linux's /dev/random file). Really fukken easy to do with dd (a linux program, but you can run it on Windows with cygwin and I think there's Windows binaries available)

If I'm not mistaken this doesn't happen with SSDs. If you blow something away on an SSD it's gone for good except for like, RAM maybe. When forensics teams (assuming they're not shit) take a system they're supposed to keep it live for RAM access.

But wouldn't it be overwritten with each new OS install, assuming you use most of the drives capacity?

No. Only the bits required to actually store the OS's information is written over. Every 1 or 0 that isn't used stays in the state it was in until it gets changed.

But what about the data not required for the OS? Like your Holla Forums folder and vidya. Wouldn't installing a fuck ton of games and saving every dumbshit maymay picture overwrite the old data fairly quickly?

ur dumb

Learn to wipe your free space, plebboid

yeah, and I bet you had at least 20 gigs of CP

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full disk encryption is for pedos and tinfoilfags

not a pedo or a tinfoil fag, I just don't want anyone going through my PC looking at my porn and other miscellaneous shit after I die.

I'm not even trying to make the "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" argument. I'm just saying that encrypting your entire drive is retarded. Do you honestly think that no one in this world can decrypt it?

Point is, anything you do on a computer can eventually be seen. Might as well just go off the grid.

Ok, here's a short lesson on data storage:
when you format a partition, you are only writing a very small amount of data to that partition which defines how large each data register is. these data registers are the smallest unit of storage on that partition (ie. if your register size is 1024 bytes, anything smaller than that will take that much space, anything bigger takes that register + whatever others are required. but no two files may occupy the same register). This is so your computer doesn't have to search your entire drive to find a given piece of information and instead just needs the registry key to point them to the proper registers.

With that in mind, think of your hard drive's disk as a tightly packed spiral of 1's and 0's with dividing lines for every register. You write data from the beginning of that spiral to the end, in one direction. When you delete files, all you're telling the computer is "don't read these sectors and they may be overwritten." Data then gets written to these sectors and, if certain files are larger than those deleted in the past, is fragmented by other registers which are prohibited from being written to. This is the point of defragmentation. To fix that because it slows down data retrieval time

why I'm telling you this is pic related. The red section is some huge program you uninstalled and deleted. The blue section is your CP that you downloaded some time after you installed the red but before you uninstalled. Now, when you delete your CP, it remains where it is until you replace all the data that once held the red program without deleting any of it, then even more to write over the CP you want gone. And this is assuming your CP isn't fragmented. some of the data could be in this little snapshot, but you could very well have a 12 year old's vagina much further down the chain of registers.

huh

Actual private investigator with computer forensics side-focus here.

If you put it on an HD, it CAN be recovered.

There is NO SURE WAY TO REMOVE ALL YOUR DATA

EXCEPT FOR THERMITE

You absolutely have to completely destroy the recording medium beyond any possible kind of readability.

this. only an SSD would leave data behind thanks to its firmwares built in write-leveling.

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I have some of that in my shed, shit's great


I met my boyfriend on here, does that count?

just encrypt your harddrive