Windows usually keeps temporary files in a special folder. For example,
C:\Windows\
Temp
or D:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\Local
Settings\
Temp
folder.
In this case, temporary files folder means a folder specified in the
temp
environment
variable. It is set by the Windows
set
command. You can
check
temp
value by typing
set
temp in the command line. As a result,
under Windows XP you will get a string like D:\Documents and
Settings\<user name>\Local Settings\
Temp
.
Temporary files can usually be determined by their extensions. For example,
they can be as follows:
•
*.bak, *.old
– back-up copies,
•
*.gid
– a temporary file, created when opening Windows help,
•
*.chk
– files, created while disk is checked for lost clusters,
•
*.tmp, *.$*, *.~*, *.---, ~*.*
– other temporary files,
created by a variety of programs.
Please note the above list is far from complete.
Besides
temporary files
clean-up
,
Acronis PrivacyExpert offers to clean your
user
folders and files
(described further), deleting all temporary files from folders
on any
connected disks
according to the provided «Files» value.
Setting the
temporary files
clean-up, you can provide *.* «Files» value to destroy
all
files
from the temporary files folder.
3.2.4
Hard Disks Free Space
Disk free space
clean-up allows you to destroy all data possibly stored in
the hard disk drive’s free space sectors.
Disk free space almost always contains information and data under the
control of Windows.
Windows does not actually remove anything when
deleting a file
: its name
is simply replaced with unusable characters for Windows in the File Allocation
Table, (FAT). The file becomes invisible only for a user, and the
cluster
chain with file data is considered free, but the information does not
disappear from the hard disk sectors. It is actually very simple to recover
deleted Windows files. There are numerous programs for doing this under
either DOS and Windows.
Formatting or deleting a partition also does not destroy information from the
hard disk sectors. It can be read directly from them if needed.
Acronis PrivacyExpert
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