Window Washer 6.0 Online Manual

Washing Free Space

You can wash the free space on your hard drive to remove any remnants from deleted files. Free space is unused hard drive space that is not allocated to any current files. However, free space may still contain all or part of files you have deleted.

When you delete a file, Windows does not actually remove the contents of the file from your hard drive. Windows only deletes a reference to the file from a table that lists all files on your computer. The table is like a table of contents that tells Windows where files are. Windows says that the file is deleted, but the content of the file still exists until Windows overwrites the same area on the hard drive with new information.

The area of your hard drive where the deleted file was is considered free space, but the content of the deleted file is still there. To completely remove any content from free space, you can wash the free space.

Note: After washing free space, you cannot recover deleted files from the Recycle Bin or using an undelete or unerase program.

To wash free space:

Start Window Washer, if it is not already open, and display the Window Washer window.
For more information, see Starting Window Washer.
In the icon panel, click Wash Utilities.
The Wash Utilities panel displays.
Click Wash Free Space.
The Free Space Washing panel displays.
From the Logical Drive drop-down list, select the drive you want to wash.
All installed and removable drives display in the list. If you have connected and disconnected a removable drive, it may still display in the list. When you completely shut down Window Washer and start it again, the removable will no longer be included.
Select the bleaching method you want.

Click to see a description of each option.

Setting	Description
Single Pass	Overwrites each deleted file once with random characters.
DOD 5220.22-M	Overwrites each deleted file 3 times with random characters in accordance with the US Department of Defense (DOD) 5220.22-M directive.
NSA	Overwrites each deleted file 7 times with random characters based on the US National Security Agency (NSA) guidelines.
Gutmann	Overwrites each deleted file 35 times using different patterns each time. This overwrite process is based on a 1996 paper by Peter Gutmann, Department of Computer Science, University of Auckland.

Click Start.
The progress of the wash displays at the bottom of the panel.