Decent program that does the job with minimal fuss. It did randomly quit the other day in the middle of a job, which I luckily checked on it and noticed, though I'm not sure if that was Eraser's or Windows' fault. As some others have mentioned (complained about), it does take a long time, but that's just the nature of what it's doing, and all programs are going to be slow; if they're not, they're not doing a good job.
Deleted Files - Still There: With the right software, it is relatively easy to recover deleted files from your hard drive. Some file recovery software can even work over a network connection. Some file recovery software can even work over a network connection. Gathers all space on a hard disk that does not belong to any partition in a file, for quick inspection to find out if something is hidden there or left from a Disk Catalog Creation. Create a table of existing and deleted files and directories, with user-configurable information such as attributes, all available.
I tried several others, and they ranged from horrible to ok. Of them, one or two would probably be suitable replacements for this one if it were to stop working, but I would say Eraser is probably the best interface and it's free, portable, and can do files, free space, and entire drives. The only thing I don't like about it is the lack of parallelization, i.e. Being able to wipe multiple drives simultaneously. I see no good reason why that shouldn't be possible, and searching the forums it seemed the dev intended to add it in v6, but that was years ago and it's now on v6.2.
I signed up on the forum to inquire about it, but then couldn't post, so that was a massive waste of time. To the devs, in case you read this: don't use a forum for support then not let people post in it (shouldn't need to be said, but there it is). To anyone looking to do multiple drives that happens to read this: as I said, I tried several programs, and none of them will do it except one, which you have to buy. What I ended up doing is setting up a VM with DBAN and assigning the drives I wanted to wipe to the VM. DBAN wipes multiple drives in parallel, but doing it in a VM allows for the computer to continue being used instead of being tied up for days, and it also ensures DBAN can only see the drives you want to wipe, so it helps prevent mistakes.
It takes many, many hours to delete the unused space on a 500GB drive. If your drive is 1TB or larger and your time is worth anything, it will be faster and cheaper to copy the files to be kept to a new drive and destroy the old drive.
Contrary to the information given here, the forum is useless for support. You will be forced to create a 10-character password for the forum account - does the admin think we only have one forum account or that we should be forced to store and retrieve thousands of passwords for sites that don't have any sensitive information? - only to find that 'you have insufficient privileges to post' a question, so there is no support there. And all of the links in the FAQ topics I was interested in (erasing free space) are broken.
Welcome back, my tenderfoot hackers! I recently began a new to help tenderfoot hackers from being detected and ultimately, incarcerated.
In this installment of that series, we will look at recovering deleted files. This is important to hackers because you need to know that even when you delete files on your computer or on the victim's computer, a forensic investigator can usually recover them. Windows File System's Since most of the victim's will likely be Windows based systems, let's focus our attention on Windows systems and their file systems. Nearly all modern Windows systems use the NTFS filesystem, but older systems may still use FAT filesystem. In fact, if you are using a flash thumb drive, it is probably formatted with the older FAT file system because that would make it usable on ALL operating systems including Linux and Mac OS X. NTFS The NTFS file system was developed for the 'new' Windows that was being developed in the late 80's and early 90's, Windows NT (hence, NT File System). Microsoft turned to a group of OS developers formerly with Digital Equipment Company (now part of HP) to develop Windows NT and new robust, reliable and secure file system.
This file system eventually superseded other file systems in the Windows family with the arrival of Windows 2000 and now you will only find NTFS on Windows systems. NTSF has a Master File Table (MFT) that tracks the location of every file on a hard drive. When a file is deleted, the MFT simply marks that area on the hard drive as available to be overwritten. Until that area is actually overwritten, the file remains intact on the hard drive and easily recovered. Even if it is overwritten, there may remain 'slack space' if the new file is not as long as the previous file. So, for instance, if you deleted a file that was 4096kb and overwrote it with a file that 3000kb, over 1000kb would be slack space and still recoverable by a forensic investigator.
FAT Filesystem FAT is a much older and simpler file system. It was the file system of the first PC's developed by IBM in 1981 using Microsoft's DOS. It has come in multiple flavors from FAT8, FAT12, FAT16 and FAT 32. It is a simple file system without all the security and other features of NTFS and Linux's ext2 and ext3. In this tutorial, we will look at recovering a deleted file from a FAT formatted flash drive, but exactly the same tools and process would apply to recovering files from NTFS, ext2, ext3, HFS, HFS+, etc. Step 1: Create a File To demonstrate how to recover deleted files, let's create a malicious document.
We will call this document 'Malicious' and create it with Notepad in Windows. Right click on the malicious file and select delete. If you put the file in the Recycle Bin, you have made it even easier for the forensic investigator to recover.
The Recycle Bin is actually simply a folder where the files are moved until you empty the Recycle Bin. Nothing is deleted until you empty the Recycle Bin. Step 3: Create an Image The first step a forensic investigator will do when examining your computer is to make bit-by-bit copy of your hard drive or in this case your flash drive.
There are numerous tools that can do this and in Linux we have the dd command that does an excellent job of making bit-by-bit copies (its on all Linux distributions including BackTrack). File backups and copies are not forensically sound as they will not copy deleted files and folders and in many cases will actually change the data. Most forensic investigators use commercial tools.
The two most popular being Encase by Guidance Software and Forensic Tool Kit by Access Data. FTK, as it is commonly known in the industry, has a free imager that creates a bit-by-bit copy of the drive. This imager is probably the most widely used in the industry and its price is right, so let's use it. You can download it. Now that have downloaded the FTK imager, we need to create a bit-by-bit image of the flash drive.
![Software Forensic Scan For Porn Hard Drive Slack Space Mac Deleted Files Software Forensic Scan For Porn Hard Drive Slack Space Mac Deleted Files](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125432629/350869948.jpg)
Go to menu at the top of the application and select:. File - Create Image It will open a wizard that will walk you through the process of opening a case and ask you for a case number, evidence number, examiner name, etc. Obviously, this software was designed for law enforcement and all evidence needs to be categorized and labelled. Finally, it will ask for a location of the physical drive you want to image, a destination directory and a name for the image file. When you are done with all these administrative tasks, FTK Imager will be begin the process of creating a forensically sound bit-by-bit image of your drive. Now that we've created a image of the flashdrive, we are ready to recover the deleted files.
Step 4: Recover Deleted Files There are many tools on the market to recover deleted files and all of them are adequate to do the job. Deleted file recovery is probably the simplest of forensic tasks.
Here, I will be using a trial version of RecoverMyFiles. You can download a trial version. Once you have installed RecoverMyFiles, select the Start Recovery icon in the upper left corner. It will ask you to select either Recover Files or Recover Drive. Select Recover a Drive. It will then search and display all your drives like that in the screenshot below.
Since we are using a forensic image, select Add Image button to the right. You will need to provide a path to your image file created with FTK.