Drive cleaning

Do you know that after simply deleting a file, it can be fully or partially restored? No, no, it does not mean the recycle bin. File contents remain on the media for a relatively long time after a deletion and with suitable software, the files can be fully or partially recovered.

This is because file contents are written to individual sectors of a storage medium and occupied sectors are managed in the medium's table of contents. When a file is deleted, only the previously used sectors are then marked as available again, but the contents of these released sectors are retained until the sectors are used again for other files.

So if the files of a protected, encrypted project were decrypted for editing and then re-encrypted after editing (which results in deletion of the unencrypted data), there is initially still a lot of unencrypted data in the sectors of the storage medium that could be reconstructed by unauthorized persons.

Only in the course of time with the saving of new files, the sectors are gradually overwritten with other data. The cleaning function of Encrypter-X takes advantage of this fact. It writes file after file (which are deleted again when the function ends) with only 0xE5 values to the selected disk and does so until the disk is full.

However, filling up an entire (usually quite large) disk is usually not necessary at all, since it is very likely that the sectors just released will be used again quite quickly. If you let the function work for a few minutes, it is highly probable that all deleted data will actually be overwritten.

However, if you want to be on the safe side, you should use small storage media to edit the unencrypted data and then clean them completely after the work is done.