CCleaner 7 & 35 Passes

[DasFox]

CCleaner I think is pretty decent at cleaning up the Temp files...

I can't remember but if memory serves me right just recently they added in Gutmann 35 passes.

From what I remember NSA 7 passes is all really anyone needs, but I was wondering does anyone here have any real info feedback on Gutmann if it helps, or not really, and if doing 35 passes could this also cause problems for the drive?

THANKS

[FadeAway]

Quoting Peter Gutmann's own words:

"In the time since this paper was published, some people have treated
the 35-pass overwrite technique described in it more as a kind of
voodoo incantation to banish evil spirits than the result of a technical
analysis of drive encoding techniques. As a result, they advocate
applying the voodoo to PRML and EPRML drives even though it will have
no more effect than a simple scrubbing with random data. In fact
performing the full 35-pass overwrite is pointless for any drive
since it targets a blend of scenarios involving all types of
(normally-used) encoding technology, which covers everything
back to 30+-year-old MFM methods (if you don't understand that statement,
re-read the paper). If you're using a drive which uses encoding
technology X, you only need to perform the passes specific to X,
and you never need to perform all 35 passes. For any modern PRML/EPRML
drive, a few passes of random scrubbing is the best you can do. As the
paper says, "A good scrubbing with random data will do about as well
as can be expected". This was true in 1996, and is still true now."

Full text here:

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html

I personally have no knowledge of drive encoding methods, but I use 7 passes
for small files, & 1 pass for large ones.

[BlueZannetti]

-{ Quote: "From what I remember NSA 7 passes is all really anyone needs, but I was wondering does anyone here have any real info feedback on Gutmann if it helps, or not really, and if doing 35 passes could this also cause problems for the drive?" }-For current technology drives - and assuming you haven't irritated a complete large sovereign nation who have years to get back to you - a single overwrite should suffice.

Although I see casual mention of recovery made, I've not been able to find a single clear and publicly documented instance in which it has occurred (again - with current technology and density HDD's) after even a single overwrite.

Blue

[jrmhng]

I've read that there is a bigger issue with meta data in NTFS (leaving traces) than data being recovered after being written over with random data.