Marking & cleaning drives

Drives must be marked if the automatic key bundle search is to look for hidden files on them. The reason for this is to make sure that the search is not unnecessarily protracted, because in order to find the hidden key bundles, the search process needs to open all PNG and WAV type files on a drive and check if there is any hidden data in them.

It must also be possible to remove these marks again and, in general, drives should be able to be "cleaned" in such a way that files cannot be recovered after they have been deleted. The functions for this can be reached via the main menu item Tools.

Mark drive ...

Remove mark ...

Clean drive ...

Mark drive

To prevent the automatic keychain search from searching for PNG and WAV type files on all drives to check if there are hidden files in them, drives can be "marked" and only on marked drives such files will be searched. It therefore makes sense to store such container files on external media such as USB sticks or SD cards, for example, and then only populate them with a marginal number of files.

Such media can then be "marked" by clicking the menu item Mark Drive .... Thereupon the drives are offered for selection, which are not marked at present.

Remove mark

If markers are to be removed from a drive again, the Remove marker ... menu item can be clicked. The drives that are currently marked are then offered for selection.

Clean drive

Recovering deleted files is something that everyone has heard of, and it is indeed possible to a certain degree with the appropriate special software, because when files are deleted, the file contents are not explicitly overwritten with neutral data, but only the sectors reserved in the media's table of contents are released for

Only when new files have been written over time are the released sectors reused and the old contents gradually disappear. The drive cleaning function takes advantage of this fact. It writes large files with neutral contents (all bytes 0xE5) to the selected medium until it is either full or the process is aborted by the user. After that all these dummy files are deleted again.

With many modern storage media it would often take a very long time until the full capacity is written, but assuming that during sector management the sectors that have just become free are reused very soon, it is certainly sufficient to run the cleaning for a few minutes even after extensive final work in order to finally remove all deleted fragments from the medium.

To perform the cleaning, the menu item Clean drive... must be clicked. must be clicked. This opens a dialog for selecting the desired drive.

After the drive selection, the cleaning process starts immediately. Its progress is visualized by means of a pie chart. The black segment represents the current occupancy of the disk. The gray area symbolizes the free space and the green segment is the currently cleaned portion.

Transfer speed and remaining time until complete cleaning are continuously displayed and the process can be stopped at any time by clicking the Interrupt button.

	Drives must be marked if the automatic key bundle search is to look for hidden files on them. The reason for this is to make sure that the search is not unnecessarily protracted, because in order to find the hidden key bundles, the search process needs to open all PNG and WAV type files on a drive and check if there is any hidden data in them. It must also be possible to remove these marks again and, in general, drives should be able to be "cleaned" in such a way that files cannot be recovered after they have been deleted. The functions for this can be reached via the main menu item *Tools*.

	Mark drive ... Remove mark ... Clean drive ...
	Mark drive To prevent the automatic keychain search from searching for PNG and WAV type files on all drives to check if there are hidden files in them, drives can be "marked" and only on marked drives such files will be searched. It therefore makes sense to store such container files on external media such as USB sticks or SD cards, for example, and then only populate them with a marginal number of files. Such media can then be "marked" by clicking the menu item Mark Drive .... Thereupon the drives are offered for selection, which are not marked at present.

	Remove mark If markers are to be removed from a drive again, the Remove marker ... menu item can be clicked. The drives that are currently marked are then offered for selection.

	Clean drive Recovering deleted files is something that everyone has heard of, and it is indeed possible to a certain degree with the appropriate special software, because when files are deleted, the file contents are not explicitly overwritten with neutral data, but only the sectors reserved in the media's table of contents are released for Only when new files have been written over time are the released sectors reused and the old contents gradually disappear. The drive cleaning function takes advantage of this fact. It writes large files with neutral contents (all bytes 0xE5) to the selected medium until it is either full or the process is aborted by the user. After that all these dummy files are deleted again. With many modern storage media it would often take a very long time until the full capacity is written, but assuming that during sector management the sectors that have just become free are reused very soon, it is certainly sufficient to run the cleaning for a few minutes even after extensive final work in order to finally remove all deleted fragments from the medium. To perform the cleaning, the menu item Clean drive... must be clicked. must be clicked. This opens a dialog for selecting the desired drive.

	After the drive selection, the cleaning process starts immediately. Its progress is visualized by means of a pie chart. The black segment represents the current occupancy of the disk. The gray area symbolizes the free space and the green segment is the currently cleaned portion.

	Transfer speed and remaining time until complete cleaning are continuously displayed and the process can be stopped at any time by clicking the Interrupt button.