Prevent Deleted Files From Being Recovered

Another article, another way to deal with your deleted data. Many times, we inadvertently delete our files and need some way to actually recover those files. For that, you can read over this article to learn how to do just that. However, at other times, we need to work in reverse. We need to make sure that our deleted files cannot be recovered! Well, I got that covered as well over here. If you want an even easier way to make your deleted files unrecoverable, then you’ll want to read on to know how to do just that with a free tool called Prevent Restore.

To read more about the basic in and out’s of how data is stored and deleted on your computer, I suggest you read over my article titled “How to Securely Deleted Data On Your Computer”, which you can do by clicking on the second link above.

Here are a couple of reasons I can think of on why you would want to make sure your deleted data is unrecoverable:

You have something to hide. This is the most obvious! It’s not my job to tell you what’s right or wrong and what you can and can’t have on your computer so as far as that goes, it’s up to you what you want stored on your computer (legal or illegal). If you need to destroy some type of data to make it nearly impossible to recover by using third party software, than you’ll want to learn about tools like Prevent Restore (talked about here) or utilizing the Windows Cipher command (talked about in my other article linked above).

Don’t want personal files ending up in the wrong hands. Travel a lot with your laptop? Chances are high you’ll have deleted some type of personal or work-related documents on it. Chances are also high that if you lose your laptop, the thieves will try to recover your data to see what you’ve got. If you also didn’t deploy some type of encryption, than it’s already game over but that’s a topic for another day and another article.

Selling your hard drive. Another obvious one. It’s so easy to buy a used hard drive from Ebay and start digging for personal information. Don’t let this happen to you.

The FBI is coming to get you. OK, this might be a little far fetched by I’m sure there’s always someone out there who thinks the law enforcement will one day just kick the door down of their apartment and seize their computers. If that happens, they’ll want to quickly delete their data and use a program like Prevent Restore to scramble their data. But I doubt you’ll have time for that if you’re being handcuffed away!

You’ll notice whatever the scenario may be, they all share a common goal and that is to prevent other people from recovering your deleted data. Just like how simply throwing your secret documents away in the trashcan isn’t going to prevent a dumpster diver from going through it once you take out the trash, simply emptying your recycle bin isn’t going to prevent someone from recovering those deleted data (assuming they have access to your computer). So, let’s cut to the chase and see what we can do about it.

Prevent Restore

Prevent Restore is a simple program that promises to scramble your empty hard drive space to prevent the recovery of files. There is a free and paid version of the software and so if you want to take advantage of advance features within Prevent Restore, you’ll need to cough up some cash. However, for the most casual of users, the free edition should be more than enough as we’ll soon see.

You can download Prevent Restore from here.

Installation is simple. Download, start the executable, and keep clicking Next. You eventually come to the language selection screen and you’ll be asked whether you want to subscribe to their newsletter or join their program. Both are entirely optional.

Before proceeding, I wanted to show you a simple demonstration of how Prevent Restore works. Therefore, I’ll show you a before and after of two file recovery tools I’ll use for this demo. I’ve simply deleted a folder with about 260 high quality pictures in it. I next fired up Recuva and DiskDigger to see what they could find. Below are the results from the two recovery tools:

Note how it pretty much found most of the pictures along with the file names all intact. Also, many of them are recoverable as I performed the recovery scan as soon as I deleted the pictures. If you also want to see what files you’ve deleted in the past that are also recoverable, than perform the same procedure as I did before proceeding with the Prevent Restore operation. You’ll be amazed at how much information can be recovered simply by using these free utilities.

Alright, so now I’ll go ahead and start up Prevent Restore to kick off the process of wiping out my empty hard drive space. Start up the program and click Next on the Welcome screen. You’ll now get to select the disk on which you want Prevent Restore to work on. Prevent Restore will also work with your portable USB thumb drives. However, it does not work on CD and DVD discs. Select the one you want and click Next.

Next you’ll select the operation mode. Standard mode should satisfy most users but if you want to go the extra step, select Complete mode. What surprises me here is the amount of grammar errors present in the description. It really makes an application look really poor and untrustworthy if they have grammar and spelling errors. However, I got the results I wanted in the end so I let this one slide but I really hope the developers of this software will let someone proof read their work before making it final.

Next we configure some final settings for Prevent Restore. You have the option of clearing your paging file if you choose so. If you have files in your Recycle Bin at this time, you can elect for Prevent Restore to safely delete them as well. At the bottom, you’ll see several options on how you’ll want Prevent Restore to securely delete your data (the algorithm). However, because we are using the free edition of Prevent Restore, we are only allowed to use the default which is replace with spaces.

Lastly, you’ll be presented with the summary. If you are ready for the process to start, click Next and Prevent Restore will then go to work. Remember, Prevent Restore will securely delete your data so that they will not be recoverable. That also means you as the user will not be able to do so as well! If you proceed with the delete only to find out afterward that you need to recover a file or document, then well, you’re on your own. I have read that previous versions of Prevent Restore did a poor job when it was executing on the computer. It slowed down the computer to a crawl and made it unusable while it was running. However, with the newest version, it seems they have fixed the problem because my computer was very much usable as it ran. Also, note how you have the option to have Prevent Restore automatically turn off your computer when it completes. This way, you can choose to perform a complete mode wipe of your hard drive (which takes longer) just before you go to bed and have a peace of mind that your computer will shut down when it finishes.

The Results

Alright, so once Prevent Restore completes, our hard drive’s empty space should not have any recoverable data left on it. To test it, I’ll once again use Recuva and DiskDigger to scan the hard drive and compare it with the scan I did prior to activating Prevent Restore. Will I still be able to recover any of the 256 pictures I deleted earlier? Here are the results:

As you can see, the recovery tools can no longer recover my recently deleted pictures. If you look closely, you’ll notice that there are now hundreds, if not thousands of more files after having gone through the Prevent Restore process. Each file is the same size and they all have a naming scheme of “b1-01234567890123456789…$$$”, “b2-01234567890123456789…$$$” etc. This does scare me a little but if you dished out some cash for the paid version, you’ll be able to write over the deleted data with a different algorithm (random gibberish for example). However, this still should satisfy many, if not all, casual users out there. As long as your actual data is not recoverable, I doubt many data thieves have the knowledge, skills, or utilities to actually piece together back the scrambled data. In fact, I’m pretty sure most data thieves only know how to do what I did earlier in that all they are utilizing are third party software tools to dig up deleted data on a hard drive and hope to find something interesting. Beyond that, they pretty much wouldn’t know what to do once they encounter all these scrambled pieces of data.