The first step removes the files from the folder. It does not delete from
the drive.
The second step does the same.
You left out emptying the recycle bin. This step makes it impossible to
restore the files, but it may still do nothing to the areas on the drive
which contain your "sensitive information".
The third step may overwrite the areas contained by your information. It is
not quite clear to me as to how the defrag program works.
All these steps do is a convoluted single pass overwrite. If you have
information that you really want to be as hard as possible to recover, then
a seven times overwrite is what you need.
Jim
"John70" <john70london@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:9a476ffc-f7de-41f8-b7c4-31235c548572@l64g2000hse.googlegroups.com...
I'd like to thank you for your information. Indeed I meant sensitive
information.

Since friday I've been thinking on this and I thought doing the
following:
- Delete the files I need to remove from disk
- Delete all temporary files including on local folders
- Proceed to defrag ( using Windows Defrag or even Contig from
Sysinternals )

Any opinion on this are appreciated.

TIA


On 5 Jul, 09:50, Anteaus <Ante...@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:
> This is a complex question with no simple answer. Although, the lowdown is
> Yes, deleted copies can be salvaged relatively easily, as only the
> directory-entry is removed, the data remains on-disk until that space is
> needed again.
>
> Word is a particular problem in this respect, since it creates temporary
> files whilst editing is in progress, and doesn't always delete them (even
> from the disk directory)
>
> There are utilities to securely erase files, but these are only effective
> if
> they are USED to delete the file. If the file was deleted by other means
> they
> may not help.
>
> http://www.analogx.com/contents/down...stem/shred.htm
>
> Lowdown is, if you have sensitive data, e.g. payroll, then you would be
> better to use a dedicated program, or else store the data in a Truecrypt
> volume.
>
> http://truecrypt.org
>
> --------------------------
> "This is a wonderful computer. It''s 20yrs old and absolutely reliable.
> And, in all that time it''s only had four mobos, six processors, two
> cases,
> seven OS''s ...."
>
>
>
> "John70" wrote:
> > I've been told that if I delete a file from the disk or if I save a
> > newer version of a file eg Word Document, there are of getting both,
> > ie, recover the deleted file and also recover previous version of the
> > files I've saved (this example, the Word Document). Is it true?
> > Because I have sensible information that I had to remove from my
> > computer how can I prevent that without having to format and reinstall
> > Windows again?
>
> > TIA