But CCleaner is nowhere near as complete as it could be. This has for instance been shown by CCleaner Enhancer, a program that adds more than 200 different cleaning rule sets to CCleaner.

Windows users looking for a CCleaner alternative have several programs at their disposal. I reviewed some of them, like System Ninja or Clear Prog in the past here on Ghacks Technology News.

Wipe 2011 is another CCleaner alternative. The program concentrates more on privacy and tracking orientated traces on the system and even identifies data that CCleaner does not find by default.

When you first start the program you will notice that it will start to scan the system for tracks and garbage. The delete tracks and garbage option is selected by default. This setting is a click one delete all option, a click on continue would delete all data found by Wipe 2011 during the scan.

Users who want more control over the process should switch to the Advanced cleaning mode option which displays the programs findings in list form with options to prevent the cleaning of specific data points on the PC system.

The advanced listing displays all of its findings in table form. listed are the type of data search, the files and Registry entries found and the total amount of disk space in bytes occupied by the data.

Checkboxes are provided to enable or disable groups or individual titles from the cleanup.

CCleaner users will find that Wipe 2011 lists several data locations that CCleaner ignores. Among them the CryptnetURL cache, RSS feeds cache, Direct3D recent program list, game statistics or the recent wallpaper list.

A right-click on any title in the Wipe 2011 software opens a context menu with options to view all contents of a particular location in the application or to delete its contents manually.

Wipe’s missing a backup and restoration option. The program can wipe data permanently from standard platter driven hard drives. Users who want that need to switch from standard deletion to anti-recovery overwrites in the program settings.

Wipe 2011 is a handy CCleaner alternative with a focus on privacy and tracking related data. Windows users can download the program from the developer website. The application is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system.

While it is not a problem for tech savvy users like you and me to encrypt a disk drive with encryption software, it may very well be one for normal computer users.

But even with encryption there is the chance that third parties may find ways to access the data on the hard drive, for instance by brute forcing the password or placing a trojan or other malicious code on a system.

Toshiba recently announced a new generation of self-encrypting drives with several advanced features that offer more than hardware data encryption.

The drives can be configured to only work on known host systems. Any attempt to connect them to an unknown host would automatically render the data on the drives useless.

The drives have been specifically designed to “address the increasing need for IT departments to comply with privacy laws and regulations governing data security” and are “ideally suited for PC, copier and multi-function printer, and point of sale systems used in government, financial, medial or similar environments”.

Drives can be configured to deny access or erase sensitive data if the authentication process fails. This would for instance be the case if someone connected the hard drive to an unauthorized computer system.

The hard drives will be offered with capacities between 160 Gigabytes and 640 Gigabytes, 7200 RPM, 16 Megabyte buffer and a Serial ATA 3,0 Gbps interface. All drives use the AES 256 encryption algorithm to protect data from unauthorized access.

The drives will be made available in the coming months, and will be first made available to OEMs and ISVs. The press release is available here.

There have always been a huge variety of hard disk wiping packages available from third-parties, but did you know that Windows 7 has it’s own free in-built tool for securely erasing, not just whole hard disks, but specific folders as well?

The cipher.exe tool has been around for years now and is used for managing the EFS (Encrypted File System) feature that preceeded Bitlocker and was first introduced with Windows 2000.  It’s run from the Command Prompt (as an Administrator).

With Windows 7 though Microsoft have added a new switch to the tool, and it’s one you should definitely use with care!

 The command is Simply cipher /w x:\folder where you would substitute x:\folder for the location you want wiped, for instance your D:\ drive or your C:\Users\Mike Halsey\Music folder.

This will write a series of 0s, 1s and then random characters to every sector of the drive or folder to securely erase the data that’s stored there.  Believe me, if you do this casually you’re not going to get your data back afterwards.

Microsoft say that this feature is here for clearing empty folders and drives that need to be erased, and it’s an excellent way to save money on expensive third-party software.

So the next time you’re upgrading your hard disk, don’t waste your money, just cipher the thing instead.

Wipe will automatically scan the system upon startup offering to clear the history and traces right away or switch to advanced mode which is displaying a list of analyzed items and the amount of files on the disk, entries in the Windows Registry and the total size of the files in a list.

The items that are found are divided into categories like Windows, web browsers like Firefox or Internet Explorer and applications like Skype or Microsoft Office.

CCleaner provides a better overview of the elements that are analyzed. Wipe on the other hand displays the previously mentioned file size, Registry and file counts for each item individually which can be very helpful in determining the biggest offenders.

Each item in the list can be selected individually by clicking on the checkbox in front of its line. It is furthermore possible to select or deselect all items in a category by selecting the category header (for instance Windows 7). This will select or deselect all items automatically.

Items that can be cleared with Wipe include:

• Windows: clipboard, mru list, temporary Internet files, rss feeds carche, recent wallpapers, thumbnail caches..
• Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer: temporary Internet files, download history, cookies, passwords..
• Windows Media Player: recent items, autocomplete and record path histry..
• Java, Flash: temporary Internet files
• Microsoft Office: recently accessed items, autocomplete history..

Missing are options to add programs or paths that are not included in the program yet. This includes for instance the Google Chrome web browser which cannot be cleaned with the program.

A click on the delete button will clear the history of all selected items. A standard delete will be performed which can be changed in the program’s options to make the traces unrecoverable. Available deletion methods are one-pass anti-recovery, DOD anti-recovery, Gutmann or Russian Gost anti-recovery (the last three only available after registration).

The deletion of files can take additional time depending on the choice in the menu. Wipe can close any running process before the history is cleared which is for instance important if the web browser is running all the time on the system.

Wipe is a good alternative to CCleaner. It lacks the customizability but offers a better overview of the files, registry entries and sizes of the entries that it lists in its interface. The program can be downloaded from the developer’s website.

A recent discussion over at the Donation Coder forum touched that subject. A user noticed that he was able to restore data from a dedicated server that was rented by someone else before. This can have some serious implications. Dedicated servers can hold all kinds of sensible data including user accounts, passwords, business databases, email addresses, personal information, photos, media and documents. Many of these can still be restored if the hard drives are not wiped correctly which obviously can be very problematic not only from a business point of view but also from a private view depending on the kind of data that has been stored on the hard drives of the dedicated server.

There are two possibilities to ensure that no third party will have access to the data stored on the server drives. Option A would be to purchase the hard drive from the web hosting company. Most will not have problems selling hard drives to their customers for a premium. This is actually a good option for most companies as it would mean that they will have physical access to the hard drive that has been in their dedicated server.

The second option is to wipe the hard drive of the dedicated server securely before the contract ends. The possible solutions are limited as the server has to be running to be able to remotely access it. One way to wipe a specific hard drive or partition of a dedicated server is to issue the following command:

shred -f -z -v -u /dev/sda

This will wipe /dev/sda, you might need to change that. The process will take some time obviously. The parameters mean the following:

• -f: force, changes permission levels to allow writing if necessary
• -z: zeroes, will overwrite the entire disk with zeroes in the end
• -v: verbose, display the progress
• -u: remove, truncates and remove file after overwriting

I was thinking of something different though. What if I want to keep my hard drives for now but make sure that deleted data can’t be recovered by any means ? I tried and ran some file recovery programs such as Recuva and it showed thousands of files that were still referenced on my system although they have been deleted before. I think that this is a privacy problem and decided to look for a way to delete all file information on the unused part of my hard drives.

I decided to use Recuva first and see how many file information it would find. After that I would run a program named Eraser which I will use to clean the unused disk space of any deleted file information and finally run Recuva again to see if this reduced the amount of files that could be undeleted from my system.

Testing my Hard Drive with Recuva:

Recuva found 33720 files on my hard drive f: that could be undeleted. This is a large amount of files.

Running Eraser:

After right-clicking the central pane I was able to create a new task. The first option was unused space on drive which is the default option in the menu. I selected the f: hard drive from the list. Eraser was showing my newly selected task in the central pane and I had to right-click that task once again and select Run from the context menu. It took two and a half hours to overwrite all the data on my 100 gigabyte hard drive.

Testing the result with Recuva:

Recuva found one file on drive f: Everything else was not found anymore which leads to the conclusion that this is an excellent way to erase file information that exists on the unused space on your hard drives. This is probably not enough to erase it for the big boys if you know what I mean but every amateur should have problems getting information about those files.

Undelete Plus is a file recovery freeware that scans your hard drive for deleted files and recovers them for you. It supports the most common file systems such as fat16, fat32 and ntfs and is able to work with removable devices such as flash memory or disk drives as well. A great feature for a freeware file recovery software is the ability to work on network drives as well.

A little bit of background information why Undelete Plus is able to recover deleted files. Many users do not know that files that are deleted are not removed from the system at once. The complete file still exists on the drive but the reference to the file is deleted. File operations on those sectors make it harder to recover those files but the right tools (professional data recovery) can still detect those files.

This is one of the reasons why I would never sell my hard drives at ebay or other websites. The right equipment is able to check on my data and this is something that I do not want to risk. Even if you wipe it carefully there is the possiblity to recover files. Not with tools like Undelete Plus though.

The scan does not take this long until it is complete, on my 300 Gb hard drive it took about 20 minutes. After the scan finishes all files that can be recovered are displayed in the main window. The left window supplies some filters, you can choose that only a certain filetype is displayed for recovery, a certain folder location or a drive. (you may scan more than one drive).

Just mark the files that you want to recover and choose to keep the original folder structure of the files or move them all into a different folder. Undelete Plus found more than 60000 files that could be recovered on my drive which is a big number, I really have to think of a way to wipe them completely after a set number of days.