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What are these temporary folders e.g. ~ERAFEWD.003A ?
- Thread starter psto
- Start date
Why is everyone allergic to reading the "Help/Help Topics" portion of the program, I wonder?
To wit:
"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 are running Windows NT or 2000 and the file system on the drive is NTFS, Eraser will next overwrite the free space on the Master File Table (MFT). The reason why this is done is that on NTFS file system, clusters are not necessarily allocated for files smaller than the size of a MFT record, but the file is stored completely in the MFT (the file is then said to be resident). If you have insecurely deleted such a small file, the free space on the MFT still may contain the file body and therefore, it must be erased as well. Windows 9x does not support NTFS file system so this step will be skipped.
Finally, the names of all previously deleted (or erased) files will be overwritten. On FAT{12,16,32} partitions this is done by going through all directory entries and overwriting deleted file entries. On NTFS partitions (Windows NT and 2000 only), Eraser creates maximum length files until the unused entries in the Master File Table are overwritten.
In addition to erasing unused disk space, you can also set the paging (swap) file to be overwritten on Windows NT and 2000. Using the General Preferences window you can enable this Windows NT security feature that overwrites all unused portions of the paging file when shutting down."
To wit:
"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 are running Windows NT or 2000 and the file system on the drive is NTFS, Eraser will next overwrite the free space on the Master File Table (MFT). The reason why this is done is that on NTFS file system, clusters are not necessarily allocated for files smaller than the size of a MFT record, but the file is stored completely in the MFT (the file is then said to be resident). If you have insecurely deleted such a small file, the free space on the MFT still may contain the file body and therefore, it must be erased as well. Windows 9x does not support NTFS file system so this step will be skipped.
Finally, the names of all previously deleted (or erased) files will be overwritten. On FAT{12,16,32} partitions this is done by going through all directory entries and overwriting deleted file entries. On NTFS partitions (Windows NT and 2000 only), Eraser creates maximum length files until the unused entries in the Master File Table are overwritten.
In addition to erasing unused disk space, you can also set the paging (swap) file to be overwritten on Windows NT and 2000. Using the General Preferences window you can enable this Windows NT security feature that overwrites all unused portions of the paging file when shutting down."
being fair to the OP, spy1, not everyone is familiar with eraser or how it works (I agree that everyone should read the documentation though!), but some people do pick up eraser from other sources and perhaps don't realise what is happening to their computer. When I first used eraser I was shocked to see lots of files, it was only when I read around why they were there I understood!
It would be great if Eraser could do similar to DBAN and blank the spaces it erases, but I'd imagine that it's impossible.
It would be great if Eraser could do similar to DBAN and blank the spaces it erases, but I'd imagine that it's impossible.
those files are OK, they are created by the way Eraser works. Don't worry about them, they are there to help delete the data in free space. Eraser works by creating lots of temp files that are used to overwrite existing data. Perfectly normal!psto said:During the "erase unused space" operation 50-100 folders
with names like
~ERAFEWD.003A
are created (and finally at the end removed again).
For what purpose are these folders ?
I cannot imagine something what should bestored in these folders.
Eraser should ERASE not CREATE
They can cause problems on NTFS formatted drives, though. The fact that there are so many of them can, in certain situations, cause the MFT to grow, possibly fragmenting it. On one of my drives, before a free space wipe, my MFT was ~385MB contiguous. After a free space wipe, it had grown to over 500MB and was split into three fragments.
I have since modified my custom Eraser v5.7 to use much larger temp files, so that it only creates, at most, a few hundred temp files instead of the 20,000+ it normally creates on my larger drives.
I have since modified my custom Eraser v5.7 to use much larger temp files, so that it only creates, at most, a few hundred temp files instead of the 20,000+ it normally creates on my larger drives.
how did you do that? I know that Eraser chooses to create smaller files, in order to make the program run better, but I'd be interested in how you did that.tateu said:They can cause problems on NTFS formatted drives, though. The fact that there are so many of them can, in certain situations, cause the MFT to grow, possibly fragmenting it. On one of my drives, before a free space wipe, my MFT was ~385MB contiguous. After a free space wipe, it had grown to over 500MB and was split into three fragments.
I have since modified my custom Eraser v5.7 to use much larger temp files, so that it only creates, at most, a few hundred temp files instead of the 20,000+ it normally creates on my larger drives.
On line 64 of EraserInternalDll.h, change ERASER_MAX_FILESIZE to whatever size you want.
Now that I am looking closer at this, it's not as bad as I originally thought. For some reason, I had read the original value and thought it was creating temp files of 4MB each but I misread the number and they are actually ~40MB (42,270,720) each. On the drive mentioned in my previous post, I had about 100GB free that was wiped. I thought it had created 20,000+ temp files but it actually only created around 2500. And 2500 temp files takes up only about 10MB of MFT space (4096 bytes per MFT record).
I guess I will have to look closer at this, because something that Eraser did caused my MFT to grow. Maybe it was the MFT option or the Directory Entries option???
Now that I am looking closer at this, it's not as bad as I originally thought. For some reason, I had read the original value and thought it was creating temp files of 4MB each but I misread the number and they are actually ~40MB (42,270,720) each. On the drive mentioned in my previous post, I had about 100GB free that was wiped. I thought it had created 20,000+ temp files but it actually only created around 2500. And 2500 temp files takes up only about 10MB of MFT space (4096 bytes per MFT record).
I guess I will have to look closer at this, because something that Eraser did caused my MFT to grow. Maybe it was the MFT option or the Directory Entries option???