ccleaner drive wipe taking forever (2024)

FAQs

How many passes does CCleaner drive wiper have? ›

If you know for sure that your hard drive is a conventional one, you can use the Security and Wipe functions in Drive Wiper, although Drive Wiper is limited to “1 pass”.

On average, it takes you several hours or several days to finish the wiping process. Assuming that the hard drive can write 100MB/s, it would take you 4 days, 39 minutes, and 22.5 seconds. Similar articles: How Long Does It Take to Format a Hard Drive.

Go to Options > Settings. Under Wipe Free Space drives, confirm which drive(s) you wish to wipe. You can also confirm if you want CCleaner to Wipe MFT Free Space.

The combination of wiping the files with CCleaner and using Windows' own reset feature, your data will be nearly impossible to recover.

Disk Cleanup excels in maintaining system health by removing outdated Windows files, such as old installations and temporary files, which can free up storage space on your PC or SSD. It's less aggressive than CCleaner, making it less likely to accidentally remove system files or other important documents.

By default CCleaner just deletes files, so is safe to use on an SSD. It does have an option in Options > Settings to perform a secure delete, but that is not selected by default. Just check that it's turned off and that 'normal deletion' is selected before you run the clean up.

Darik's Boot And Nuke (aka DBAN) is the best free data destruction software I've ever used. It's an open-source project and a great tool that should certainly be your first choice if you're wanting to completely erase a hard drive. However, you should know that it doesn't support SSDs.

CCleaner is well known for its Performance Optimizer that removes junk files from your computer. Among other things, users flock to it because of its comprehensive features, ease of use, and free version that gets the job done at zero cost.

Which version of CCleaner is malicious? ›

The 5.3 version of CCleaner that got compromised produced two payloads of malware. The first spread installed spyware called Floxif on the computers. The spyware gathered the data of all running processes.

It has been reported that a version of Piriform CCleaner.exe has been compromised/trojanized resulting in the installation of multi-stage backdoor capable of receiving instructions from threat actors on affected systems. Listed below are the affected versions of CCleaner: CCleaner version 5.33.

You've probably heard that you need to overwrite a drive multiple times to make the data unrecoverable. Many disk-wiping utilities offer multiple-pass wipes. This is an urban legend -- you only need to wipe a drive once. Wiping refers to overwriting a drive with all 0's, all 1's, or random data.

However, all that's needed to securely wipe the free space on a hard drive is cipher's /w switch: cipher /w:C: Note that cipher 's syntax is slightly odd in that it requires one colon after the /w switch, followed by the drive letter of the volume that you want to securely wipe.

CCleaner speeds up computers by updating your software, cleaning up your machine, and helping you disable programs that can slow down your computer's startup procedure.