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Wiping Free Space



Free space is the space on a drive that is not being used by any files.

For example:

A 20GB (Giga-byte) hard drive that contains 15GB of files will have 5GB of free space.

If I were to fill the 5GB of free space with 4GB of files then there will be 1GB of free space.

If I then deleted the 4GB of files that I just put on the drive there will be 5GB of free space. That 5GB of free space will still contain all the data from the 4GB of files that I just deleted.

You may not want that data to be stored on your computer and that is why you would wipe the free space on your drive.

For example: If you are selling your computer, you may have deleted your personal files from the hard drive but they could still be resident in the free space. When you sell your computer, the buyer could use a free space scanning program to detect and un-delete your personal files.

Even if you format or defragment a hard drive, there could still be data stored in the free space.

You could manually wipe the free space yourself by creating multiple copies of large junk files on your computer until you run out of disk space but, this is tedious to do manually.

Wiping the free space on your drive will wipe any data contained within the free space.

Wiping the free space will not alter any files or folders on your computer.

Here is an example on how to wipe the free space contained on drive c:\:

1.

Right click on the FileMonkey icon and select "Run as administrator".

2.

Once you have targeted your files, select the "Quick-Find, Delete" menu item from the main window.

3.

This will open the wipe files/free space window (See Fig 1 below).

Fig 1
wipe free space

4.

Set up the wipe window exactly as in fig 1 (above).

5.

To start the operation (To wipe all free space on drive C:\) click on the "Start" button.



Related Topics:
FileMonkey Tutorials
Frequently Asked Questions
Wiping And Deleting Files Example

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