Eraser 6 has a huge change in the user experience, favouring a single erasure happening at any one time and using an asynchronous model of erasure execution for a few reasons:
- Having only one erasure running at a time reduces the amount of time required for multiple erasures to complete. The rate-limiting component in an erasure in modern hard drives is the seek time – writes and reads can complete in the order of the nanoseconds, but seeks require approximately 5 milliseconds (in the ideal case scenario, as of mid-2009)
- Eraser did not allow users to execute an unused disk space erasure from within the Windows Explorer context menu (in Windows Vista and later with User Account Control enabled)
- Having all erasures completed in one place allows for easy management of all erasure tasks.
- Having tasks run asynchronously allows users to do other things when running an erasure. Currently, when an erasure is being run, Windows Explorer cannot be used when erasures are initiated from the context menu and when an erasure is run from the Eraser program, Eraser itself cannot be used.
Migrating to Eraser 6
It is also important to note that all Eraser 5 tasks will not be automatically migrated to Eraser 6 tasks due to the very different nature of erasure tasks. Therefore, when upgrading from Eraser 5, the suggested migration plan is thus:
- Install Eraser 6
- Run Eraser 5, manually creating the new tasks in Eraser 6’s scheduler
- On-Demand tasks will be created with a Run Immediately schedule
- Scheduled tasks will be created with a Recurring schedule
- Migrate your custom erasure methods from Eraser 5 to Eraser 6
Terminology Changes
Eraser 6 uses some terminology differently than it was used in Eraser 5. The most notable change will be the use of a “Task”. A Task in Eraser 5 only allowed for one schedule and one file, folder or unused space of a drive to erase. In Eraser 6, the objects to erase on a drive are now known as a Target and a single Task can have multiple targets. This allows for easier scheduling of a task, so one schedule can result in multiple targets being erased.