Ticket #147 (accepted enhancement)

I think it would be a great feature for Eraser V6 to enable the user to make ballast files.

A ballast file is a file that is used by Eraser users to fill up free space on a very large hard drive so regular free space erasures can be performed in much quicker time as the ballast files reduce the free space on the disk.

This would also help Truecrypt users with plausible deniability (yes I am still banging on and on about that !).

How it would work.

A user would have say a 500GB disk. Say 50GB was used with OS and some storage. If this user wishes to wipe his free space he would have to wipe 450GB of free space and also presumably the cluster tips of the first 50GB.

This would obviously take a long time and it would add considerable wear to the drive. In order to help the user Eraser should have an option to create ballast files.

The user should be able to open Eraser, click the “Create Ballast File” button and be presented with a new window.

Within this new window there should be an option to choose how many ballast files to make, a drop down ballast file size KB,MB,GB, a naming prefix (which could be left blank in which case a random name will be created) and to which drive they are to be saved.

The ballast files should be created with Erasers CSPRNG pass as this will help the Truecrypt plausible deniability feature as a truly random output from Eraser should be no different to a Truecrypt volume.

So as for the example above the user would perhaps select the following settings.

10 x 40GB files. (This would take up the bulk of the free space, the 40GB chunks can be deleted when a lot of drive space needs releasing).

4 x 10GB files. (This will enable fine tuning when only a small amount of free space is required at a later date).

So the user has created 440GB of ballast files reducing the free space to erase to only 10GB plus cluster tips.

Truecrypt users can claim their Truecrypt volumes are actually Eraser ballast files so there is no volume.

Thoughts Joel ?