Is free space wiping good for computer?

Question

Is free space wiping good for computer?

Answer 1

There are a few pro's to wiping free space on a computer:

1) When you delete a file, leaving some free space behind, the file isn't actually erased - only the information pointing to it is deleted so the computer doesn't see it anymore and only sees blank space ready for reuse. Obviously, this could be a security risk as it is very easy to restore these files from the hard disk even though they've been deleted. Wiping the free space works by writing a pattern of data over free space a number of times so that any file remnants that are left behind are obliterated and this makes it harder if not impossible for deleted files to be restored.

2) From the minute a hard drive is manufactured, it starts to fail but this is entirely normal. Through use the failure is monitored by the hard drive's internal systems and areas of the disk that fail to meet the performance criteria are flagged as bad sectors.  A certain proportion of bad sectors are safe before the computer will alert you to the problem.  But what if your computer never accesses part of the hard drive that is bad and so doesn't know about it? Free space wiping will help the hard drive detect bad sectors and flag them up as unusable.

The main downside of free space wiping is that it can be extremely time consuming on large drives. With this in mind, I've never found that the amount of time was worth spending for any of the benefits above.  If security is your main concern then it may well be your only choice.

(on a side note - if security is your aim, then an alternative might be file shredding which securely deletes a file, then overwrites the space where it lived on the hard drive - the problem with this approach is that most applications will use a temporary space on the hard drive called a cache when you are working on a file to keep a working copy of it. When you close the application, this cache is deleted, but it is not shredded and so any information in the cache about the file that was being used by the application can be recovered. Free space wiping is the best method to get around this.)

Answer 2

depends.

are you trying to recover something?

Answer 3

what the h**l r u on about

Answer 4

Yes, especially if you are going to give or sell the PC to someone else, and you don't want them to recover the files you deleted and think they are gone forever.  

Imagine if, the person you gave the PC to ran a recovery program and undeleted your quicken files?  Those candid photos you took of yourself and your spouse??

If you wipe your free space (after you deleted the files you don't want someone else to recover and removed all the windows restore points) then it will be extremely difficult to restore those files, and you can sleep well at night after you sell your pc :)

For standard/regular maintenance I usually just run a defrag and a reg cleaner (like ccleaner) every few months and that is usually enough - free space wiping is not really considered standard maintenance, only a file recovery deterrent.  If you are security conscience consider full drive encryption such as truecrypt http://www.truecrypt.org it will render the entire C: drive completely inaccessible from ALL normal file recovery techniques as you have to provide a passphrase to even mount the drive.

cheers