noob question

[voidix]

Just trying to speed up my computer a bit, and get rid of whatever miscellaeneous stuff I don't need. I used a file recover software, and saw the thousands of files that were still being recognized. I downloaded this tool and ran the erase unused space function to get rid of it. It freed up a gig and a half of space, which is nice. My question is, now when I use the file recover program I still get a lot of files recognized, but now they are 0kb files with "000000000000000..." as their names. Is this how the eraser program is supposed to function, replacing the old files with these new ones?

Thanks

 

[spy1]

It didn't "replace the old files with these new ones" - that's all that is left of the "old" ones (they've all been changed to zeroes).

Running a free-space wipe doesn't really gain you back anything - you had the same amount of free-space before and after the run (if ALL you did was a free-space wipe) - it's just that now all that space is un-recoverable as anything intelligible (and the MFT records and the cluster tips and the directory entries for all that previously-deleted stuff).

To the best of my knowledge, the only way Eraser can give you back any HD space is if you run it on something you're getting rid of besides free-space.

 

[voidix]

I checked my HD space before and after the program was run, and I didn't do anything in between. Went from 25.5 GB to 27. Not sure how it happened then, but thanks for answering my question

 

[spy1]

Maybe zeroes take up less space? 8)

 

[Robbie]

or perhaps the System Restore feature has been turned off? On an 80GB hard drive the default option is for System Recovery to take up a maximum of about 8GB of space. If this switches off, that's potentially a lot of extra space freed up.

 

[Robbie]

It didn't "replace the old files with these new ones" - that's all that is left of the "old" ones (they've all been changed to zeroes).

My understanding is that those files are Eraser files, and not just empty shells of old files. I thought that as part of the freespace wipe, Eraser creates thousands of small, temporary files, which are then deleted - what you see are the zero KB files left behind by Eraser.

This is from the Help file:

To overwrite the free space, Eraser creates a temporary directory, which it fills with files (these are deleted after the erasing is finished). Multiple files are used because it is faster than creating one huge file. Data will be written until there is no more space available on the drive. This procedure may take a long time if the free area is large and it may slow down your computer substantially; especially if the paging file (swap) is located on the selected drive. This is another reason why you should close all applications before erasing unused space.


If you think about it, if you run a frespace wipe on a fairly new computer, most of the freespace may be untouched and have never been used at all, but you'll still get these thousands of 0kb files.