DriveScrubber 3 - If You Think Those Deleted Files Are Gone, Think Again

Whether you realize it or not, information you delete on your computer is not really erased at all. In fact, it’s actually marked as “overwrite-able” and that’s it. Holding the shift key while hitting delete makes no difference and emptying your recycle bin is nothing but a visual aid. Your data remains there on the drive until it’s overwritten. With the size of modern hard drives it could take quite a while for natural overwriting to occur. Even then there are forensic file system utilities that can recover even somewhat overwritten data.

This fact is constant whether you’re deleting files from your computer in Windows Explorer,  your Internet settings, history, or temporary files. It is something to consider when restoring a computer you own to sell or give away without leaving your personal information in it for others to see.

Another good reason a user might want to truly scrub a drive or a system would be the unfortunate occurrence of a virus, Trojan, or other malicious script that continues to persist even after deletion attempts.

In all these cases, your data is still there on the hard drive, thumb drive, external drive, or whatever medium you’ve saved and deleted to, until you scrub it clean.

If you want to see for yourself, download and try out “Restoration” (a free file recovery application by Brian Kato) from http://www.snapfiles.com/get/restoration.html that will show what you’ve left behind on your various drives. This is the utility I used to test how well DriveScrubber 3 worked at truly deleting files.

Given the manner in which data really exists on computers there is a the need for all users to protect their data, identity, and  privacy. A good utility that truly erases information from your drives exists now as never before. With that said, is DriveScrubber 3 one of these? Read on.

For only $29.95 you can use DriveScrubber 3 on up to three computers simultaneously, which is kind of interesting and similar to how Microsoft licenses OneCare. Since there are free applications designed for the same need, the question is whether DriveScrubber is worth $10 per machine. Therefore it is a matter of whether it does a better job, which includes providing a quality user interface and support, than its freeware competition.

I’ve used free software and I’ve used DriveScrubber 3. Even though I’m not a novice user I prefer DriveScrubber 3. The reason being that since DriveScrubber 3 isn’t shareware or freeware they have an actual budget to develop and support the product. The quality and usability of the product far outweighs its modest price.

It’s clear that DriveScrubber 3 was designed for ESD (Electronic Software Distribution). What you initially download is a small “download manager” (451 KB). The first time you run the product it actually goes out to the company’s website and downloads the newest build. When that is completed you have an option to save the downloaded installation files. The download isn’t all that big (4.51 MB). In addition, you’ll always download the newest installation files by running the download manager. I’m not sure if it's worth saving the files.

Once your installation download is complete you will have several options regarding installation and licensing. You can buy it at this point in the process, or if you already bought it and have a serial number enter it here. There is also the option to demo the software before making a decision.

All in all the installation was high quality and well designed by the developers.

DriveScrubber 3 has a very nice user interface. It’s a pleasant looking and very simple arrangement. Itt fires right up showing you which drives it can work with on your computer. It gives you choices as to whether you want to wipe unused portions of a drive or an entire drive. I suppose it’s fairly easy to design a simple UI for a product like this since its feature set only involves rendering information completely erased from a drive. Then again, I’ve seen some simple programs with bad user interfaces.

One thing I really liked was that the UI has a block on the right side which lets you know if you’re running the most current version. That’s a nice touch. There’s also a good entry point into the help and support system, which is a typical. It has a CHM arrangement that is well written and provides links to the company’s support site as well.

For this product, simplicity is its strong suit. You don’t have to be a computer scientist or even know what it is you’re trying to wipe clean. You’ve got two general selections; scrub unused space on a drive or scrub a whole drive or drive partition.

Should you want to take it to the next level you can create a CD boot disk to assist in scrubbing a computer system. This will make hard drive will be as “clean” as the day it was born. Of course, doing this to a system you’re intending to continue using would be a disaster unless you were intending to reload the original software and any other programs you installed. Fortunately, you can’t delete anything critical accidentally since DriveScrubber 3 has a number of safety protocols in place.

Some of the other features that make DriveScrubber 3 a solid, well thought-out piece of software include flexible data destruction options and techniques along with a boot disk creator for a full drive wipe of a primary drive containing the system’s original software. Also, support for multiple drives and partitions including camera cards, thumb drives, external hard drives, etc., and a nice graphical drive security analysis display which will show you the current risk level of any attached drive.

Performance of DriveScrubber 3 was very good. Since it’s searching a hard drive and overwriting unwanted data several times you should expect it to take a little while. The time it takes to do its job is related to the speed of your computer, the speed and size of the hard drive and the amount of data that it has to overwrite in order to destroy.

My tests as to whether it worked were not limited to just creating a file and deleting it. I wanted to know how intuitive it was using the following process:

I deleted my history and all offline data in Internet Explorer 7 (IE7). I figured this would be a common deletion for most users. Then I ran Restoration and tried to recover the files from C:\Documents and Settings\ {User}\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files. All the files that should have been deleted through IE7 were, in fact, still there according to Restoration. I copied the files and folders to a thumb-drive then dragged them back into C:\Documents and Settings\ {User}\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files. My temporary files were restored to their previous state (not what I wanted to see in this case).

Next, I repeated step one and cleared out all that data through Internet Explorer, then ran DriveScrubber 3 to delete all unused disk space including, hopefully, the IE temporary files. After that I ran Restoration again to see if I could recover anything at all but couldn't. The data was truly gone this time. There are a couple of files still visible in the Restoration view but most of them were actually created while I was using my browser as DriveScrubber 3 ran. For more sensitive situations I would have stopped all system activity and used the “deep scrub” method in the DriveScrubber options. Nevertheless, going from 16647 recoverable files to eleven is nothing to sneeze at.

I guess that shouldn’t come as a surprise since the company has built the product to meet and exceed U.S. Department of Defense standards (DoD 5220.22-M) which even takes into account the most advanced recovery/forensic techniques that may be used to recover deleted data.

I was also pleased to see that i willl run on any operating system from Windows 98 right up to Windows Vista.

In my opinion DriveScrubber 3 from iolo Technologies is a good value and a valuable addition to any computer user’s collection.

Whether you want to hide information from someone you know or just want to rest easy knowing that the hard drive you threw away, sold, or gave away is truly “empty,” DriveScrubber 3 will protect you by rendering all unwanted data unrecoverable.