Eraser needs some work...

windyweather

New Member
I just tried Eraser. My conclusion is that it's not really done. at least in the area of Free Space cleaning.
I just did some maintenance of old Backup CD's from 1999->2002 which involved copying them to my HD and then writing them to DVD to back them up to modern media.
And now I would like to clean up my HD to remove all traces of that old stuff.

So, I went looking for file eraser programs.

Yours was near the top of the list of several recommendations.

I'm using Win7 x64 HP. And Eraser doesn't work. At least for Free Space Erasing.
Ok. I get that I might need to run it as administrator.
But even when I do that it gives me the same error message - The thing about not having enough privileges etc.
Well, I really don't think the ideas in this post are a good idea.
http://eraser.heidi.ie/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=8858
I don't want to mess around with an Administrator account, which for all i know might leave a security hole in the system that a hacker would walk through. I don't know. Maybe it's safe, but seems to me that "Run as Administrator" ought to be good enough to take care of the problem of erasing free disk space.

I tried to run it on restart, and I got no positive acknowledgement that it worked. It was unclear whether I needed to shut down Eraser before the restart or leave it running. After the restart, Eraser said that the task was queued. Huh? I just restarted. It should have worked or failed, but Duh? I just did a restart... I need some feedback here and this needs to work easily...

Then I went over and got File Shredder and I followed the wizard and it just works. It's erasing my Free space now as I speak.
So I suggest:
  • taking a clue from a program that is easy to use and make Eraser work like File Shredder.
  • All the queuing stuff is great. Might not be in File Shredder. I've not studied it yet. I'm solving my problem right out of the box before I know what the whole program does. Eraser is too hard to get going. Eraser makes me queue stuff when I just want to DO stuff. Just let me DO something.
  • Maybe go one better than File Shredder and other competitors and put in a search program that looks for files to recover from free space. Show me that you cleaned things up by not finding anything. Or show me that Eraser is a good thing by letting me see that I need to run Eraser. Just have an Option to Find Lost Files. If I find embarrassing stuff, then I better run eraser to clean them up. :shock:

Just some hopefully constructive criticism.
Thanks,
ww
 
The feedback is shown in the task manager, you can also start the task running immediatly.
Areyou saying it queued the task and did nothing?
 
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