How to securely delete files on Android, pc, windows and mac - Motorola Droid RAZR

Hey,
I haven't proven this yet but I think I've got a method for securely deleting files on any OS. The reason people need to do "secure delete" rather than simply deleting files is because this only removes the directory to those files, a fact that can be exploited by anyone motivated to see whatever file it is you're trying to trash, Complex programs that can be used do some sort of shuffling to accomplish a more secure delete. This is all necessary until the space is used up again, at which point it can't be storing both the old and the new file.
All you gotta do is:
take any group of files,
copy and paste them repeatedly
keep filling in the free space until there's none
delete copies
jobs done
I'd love to know if and why this isn't true, it does seem too simple. Anyone know how to extract deleted files (to test it)?

Related

Cannot delete temporary files "MsgQueueData"...

I have noticed some temporary files (some really big - 1.65M) with names like "MsgQueueData..." created in the Windows directory under "My Device". I cannot delete these files as it says there is a share violation and these files are chewing up my available space. I tried restarting my pocket PC and yet I cannot delete them. Can someone please help
i havent heard about anybody being able to delete them
i asumed that they were pages files for different services
like phone and sms and...

Deleting/Editing Nandroid Backups

Is there a way to edit the name of the backup files in amons recovery. and is there a way to delete the backups. any help appreciated thanks
The backups are all located in the nandroid folder on your sdcard. the first folder inside nandroid is your device's serial number or something, the ones inside that are the backups, named by date and time. im pretty sure you can renaame these folders with no harm done to nandroids restore abilities and deleting them does absolutely no harm
if you want to edit the internals, you need to unyaffs it
When i rename the back up it will never let me back up so i wouldnt do that.... i lost my backup because of this :/
that sucks
He is right.. i went into the sd card went to nandroid and tried changing the names of the backups to keep them organized and it wouldnt restore.. then i renamed them to what they were before i changed them and they restored succesfully.. so can anyone shed some light if it is even possible to rename these nandroid backups?
Im sure it is an issue with Amon-ra's program.
Go find the guy and ask him.
There is a way to edit the name and still have the backups work.
The original name is BSD-20100330-0745. You apparently need the last part for the date and such. I changed the name to EvilEris1.1 and it failed, but if it is changed to EvilEris1.1-20100330-0745 it works. You just need the "-20100330-0745". So "(name)-20100330-0745" will work.
Amon_RA said:
Renaming works fine, just don't use spaces or special characters.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
i didnt link the thread he posted that in because i told him about this thread and dont want posts in two places. though you could find it easily im sure....
Excellent, that is better than what I had to do.
Problem solved!!!!!!!
I was just messing around with it for an hour or so and I resolved my own question.... You can name the backups what ever you want.. you dont have to have the dates or anything just no spaces in the name... so if you wanted to name it "Evil Eris 1.1" it would have to be something like this... "Evil-Eris-1.1" No Spaces...
You could also (from a computer with your phone in recovery) do:
adb shell
nandroid-mobile.sh -b
It will ask you what to name it, and then it will automatically add the suffix.
you get the "run mobile.sh" error if you rename the folder directly under the "nandroid" folder on your sd card directory. you will also get this error if your battery is low or you have no storage left. the folder directly under the "nandroid" folder it is your serial number. if you're having issues, just go to the "other" menu and select "send recovery.log to SD card." then go in and search the recovery.log file on your sdcard for "serialno=" right after that there will be a 12 character string of capital letters and numbers directly followed by lower case letters that are useless for this purpose. Create a folder with the same name as that string (capital letters and numbers only, no lower case) and place your previously renamed backups into that folder and voila! you'll be able to restore them.
burdenedreflect said:
The backups are all located in the nandroid folder on your sdcard. the first folder inside nandroid is your device's serial number or something, the ones inside that are the backups, named by date and time. im pretty sure you can renaame these folders with no harm done to nandroids restore abilities and deleting them does absolutely no harm
if you want to edit the internals, you need to unyaffs it
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
thank you, it worked for me
I'm not sure this is the correct place to post this info or my question, but I believe it is at least relevant to the topic at hand. If not, I apologize profusely.
I have numerous backups created with CWM (v6.0.1.0) that are eating up an enormous amount of space on my Galaxy Nexus SD card. I've been flashing numerous ROMs and Kernels and I want to get rid of most, if not all of those backups and then create a fresh one from my current working/bootable ROM (JB 4.1.1), just so I have a good backup to roll back to if/when I hose up my phone.
For poking around on the the SD card, I'm using a Windows-based program called 'Android Commander' (Google it), which I find to be exceptionally handy. It is very much like Total Commander, which I've been using for MANY years (since version 1.0 of the original Windows Commander) on Windows boxes, as well as a variant under numerous Linux distros.
At any rate, what I've discovered is as follows;
1. the contents of the /clockworkmod/ directory on the SD card contains three directories and a couple of files (in its root). The directories are;
/clockworkmod/backup/
/clockworkmod/blobs/
/clockworkmod/download/
2. the /clockworkmod/backup/ folder contains folders that are dated and time stamped (date and time the backups were created).
3. within each of the /clockworkmod/backup/date-time folders, there are six (6) files, the largest being the 'recovery.img' file. There is also a 'boot.img' file and four (4) other files that are quite small. Each 'recovery.img' file sizes are in gigabytes (yeah, I have a lot of crap on my phone), so it's pretty obvious that deleting these directories will give me a great deal more storage space, which is my main goal in life right now (recoup all that space).
4. my main point here, however, revolves around the /clockworkmod/blobs/ director. There are over 3000 sub directories within that directory, and I have no idea how many files are within those sub directories or how much space on the SD card they occupy, although my guess is around 8-10 gigabytes. Being an astute user of Google, here's what I found out about all this;
"Starting with version 6, duplication support has been built into clockworkmod recovery. The blobs directory folder contains a hashed directory structure that holds the duplicated files across all backups."
// This info was derived from a post on Android Enthusiasts (author unknown).
"Don't delete anything in your blobs folder. Those are your nandroid backups. Starting with CWM6, it makes incremental backups and your backup files point to the files in the blobs folder. To free up space, delete unwanted backups and the next time you run nandroid, it will delete the unneeded files in the blobs folder."
// This info was derived from a post by 'NotJustAPhone', a very senior member of the Android Central forum.
And for my next trick ... what I'm wondering is if it REALLY matters whether or not I blow away the contents of the 'blobs' directory, and I guess that's my question. What if I do delete everything in 'blobs'? Since I'm going to flash another ROM and Kernel anyway, does it matter? That directory obviously started out life as being empty, right? What will CWM do, or more importantly, NOT do, should I blow away the contents of the 'blobs' directory (assuming the file system will let me)? Won't CWM just create a new/fresh/relevant set of directories/files within 'blobs' the next time I do a backup? Has anyone actually tried doing that?
And just in case anyone is wondering, the only thing in the /clockworkmod/download/ directory is the clockwordmod img file.
Thanks in advance for any response this might elicit.
Old Fart
ImaOldFart said:
I'm not sure this is the correct place to post this info or my question, but I believe it is at least relevant to the topic at hand. If not, I apologize profusely.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hi! You're in the HTC Droid Eris section of the forum, and the latest version of CWM for the Eris is much older (v2.x).
Without direct experience with the newer versions, all I can wonder is that doesn't CWM have any way built-in to delete old backups?
On the Eris, the easiest and most reliable way of using CWM is through installing the "ROM Manager" app, in which you can then manage your backups from the Android interface. In the future, you might want to consider trying that for your device as well as it may make it easier for you to manage your own backups.
I have no idea if under your configuration if installing ROM Manager now would help you delete your old backups, and I realize that even then you would probably only be able to delete them one by one, which is how it works for me in ROM Manager, and that being able to delete them en mass via Windows might be tempting. I keep four backups of my currently running ROM, and number them. I keep the very first one which is usually after I configure the ROM to my liking without really installing or restoring any apps.
Maybe you should ask wherever CWM-specific support is, but definitely at least in the section for your phone might attract better answers.
Good luck.

(Tool) Compare files.

First off I have nothing to do with the creation of this tool I'm merely sharing what I've found.
Anyone who has dug into smali files knows that they can be somewhat overwhelming and trying to track down a problem can be a time consuming nightmare. One thing I do to hunt down a problem is compare what I know to be working against what is broken so I was sitting here today thinking that I would write a script or create a tool to batch compare files then I said to myself "EB, you're not the first one that's wanted to do this so there must already be something." I fired up Google and sure enough there are a few. The one that I found that is free and handled my task can be found here http://www.grigsoft.com/download-windiff.htm
Quick tutorial;
1. Download the file.
2. Create a new folder (anywhere you want)
3. Extract the contents to your new folder
4. Place the items you want to compare in that folder (they can be anywhere really but it's simpler to have them in the same directory.)(For my purposes I de-compiled the classes.dex of two framework.jar files and moved the entire output files to this directory in two separate folders.)
5. Run the program
6. Select File
7. Select either Compare Directory (what I did for my purpose) or Compare files. A dialogue box will pop up where you select the 2 sources that you want to compare.
Now this tool will only output what files are changed. There are other tools out there that can do more but I like the ones that are free. At least with this I can scan hundreds of files at once and see where I need to begin
if you want to search for code in multiple files and what not else,
http://notepad-plus-plus.org/
has a great program for that
You can search inside the files of a whole folder if you want to....pretty cool

Why do programs with root not see past the data folder?

Hey all, I'm a noob. But I got my NT pretty much where I want it to be. I realize now that the extra space is in the data file system (yeah, I can use the extra gigs). Now, my biggest problem is that my .cbz .cbr files do not have a default program or association. This is a problem because my root accessible comic readers will read to the data folder but when you open up the data folder it says nothing is there. At this point, I just need a comic app that links up .cbz .cbr s as the default program for those file types so that I can open the file from on of my file expolorer programs. Or I need to figure out a way that allows my rooted comic apps to actually go into the data folder. Why won't these programs look into the file system past data?
Now,
I did try the permanence method to link a usrdata file to the mnt/internal file, but while it creates the mnt/internal file it does not fill it in with my files...which sucks (I just folled the instructions and I think it may require the snowball mod). I do like the B&N reader for my epubs, so I don't want to use the snowball mod
And even in snowball could not work, in OP is posted that many apps can still be incompatible
Sent from XDA using one of my Android Toys

[Q] Is there any way 2 get rid of the unused app folders apps leave behind?

I have a ton of folders on SD card and some places on my phone's internal storage that I want to know how to delete, bottom line is some of them are important folders that may be required by the system - some contain downloaded data from games and what not - such as The Sims Freeplay - that range in sizes from 400MB to 900MB.
I'm running on a stock phone, HAS NEVER BEEN ROOTED, DO NOT WANT TO ROOT THIS PHONE TO GET RID OF THESE - is there any ways to do this without rooting the phone?
Any help is appreciated
SDCard folder deletion
Hi,
As everyone gets to read/write on the sdcard you should be able to delete everything on the card.
Since you are unsure if the files are still needed, I'd suggest you back them up, delete them and put them back on the card if you run into problems.
Take a look at the files timestamps to identify old and probably unused files.
As for deleting stuff, I see several ways to accomplish that:
transfer files via USB mode
use a file manager from the market and just click your way through
use ADB from the android SDK, this will open a shell and you can use all the unix commands you want. You'll also have access to 'adb push' and 'adb pull' to transfer files.
Astro file manager .
Sent from my HTC PH39100 using xda premium
You can probably just delete the files using a file manager. It's tedious though.

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