That darned Task List wont go away

N

northridge

New Member
Tried to erase the Task List and it came back again, exactly the same as before.
Uninstalled Eraser 6 and the List was still there (in AppData) after a reboot.

Why erase it? Why not? Thats what Eraser´s for, no?
In my case Its full of titles of stuff I have erased, like "My Wife with next-doors dog.MOV", "Clinton/Lewinsky ashtray residue" and "Here are all my CCard numbers" - and I dont want a list of erased files available.
Is it possible to keep this Task List cleaned?

And a Happy New Year to you too.
 
As Eraser is a running program, I doubt that Windows will allow you access to the Task List. It is misleading that when you try to erase the file, it seems to disappear, and is then, as you say, re-created with all tasks intact.

What you can do is close the running instance of Eraser, manually delete Task List.ersx to the Recycle Bin, and erase the contents of that when you re-start Eraser. An easier, but less secure, method is just to delete the offending entries from the List.

Eraser will re-create the Task list whenever it restarts (if one does not exist already), because it needs one to function. The new one will, of course, be blank.

The manual is silent on what happens to the text of a Task List entry when it is deleted. You make a good case for it to be securely overwritten if this is not done already. I know that Joel has plans to change the Task List format to XML; perhaps the secure erasure of entries could be implemented when this is done.

David
 
I think a few Eraser behaviours help:

  1. The list is saved only when Eraser is exited.
  2. The list is created when Eraser is started; if the list does not exist, as David has mentioned, Eraser will default to a blank one
  3. Deleted tasks will not be saved to the task list (a blank task list should be very small, as it only contains the headers)
As such, if you wish to clear the task list, you can erase it while Eraser is running; deleting all the tasks before Eraser exits (either by exiting it manually or at shut down) should result in your tasks not being saved to the list. Perhaps of note is that recurring tasks will no longer work.

Perhaps you may also want to look at the Delete Tasks when they complete successfully setting. By default, that is on and will clear single-use tasks upon successful completion.
 
Dear friends

Thanks for all. I like That darned Task List wont go away very much.

Very useful for me.

If you have some time, pls visit my blog at: Tasks list

Rgs
 
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