Other Norton Products

[NotaCanada]

I came across Eraser from http://eraser.heidi.ie/ about a year ago and found V6 to be painfully slow when securely deleting a file. I stuck with ccleaner for securely deleting my files. In options under settings secure deletions has the following 
Options

Secure file deletion (number of different settings)
Wipe alternative data streams
Wipe cluster tips

I have mine set to
Secure file deletion (simple Overwrite 1 pass)
Wipe alternative data streams
Wipe cluster tips

Why?
Because when a file is deleted the entire cluster is cleared.
This is important because when the cluster is rewritten to and not fully used the cluster tip is clear.

Example

cluster size = 4096 bytes.
1k of data 3k zeros
Normally it would be
1k of data 3k random junk

This improves the ability of ghost to compress the data of the cluster.

I goggled wipe cluster tips and Eraser from http://eraser.heidi.ie/ was displayed in the results.
After doing some reading I found that in wiping the free space it wrote a wipe pattern to the cluster tips of active files.
Once again I found V6 to be painfully slow and almost unusable. I went into there forums and found V5.88. I created a custom 1 pass wipe which writes zero's to wipe the cluster tips (the default wipe patterns are pseudo random and run multiple passes).

After running on my OS or C: drive (which took about 1 hour to complete). I was impressed to find that my image of my C: drive was reduced by 1.5GB. I have a run Eraser on my data partitions as well with an average savings of between 200MB to 500MB per 20GB partition.

My questions are:
Does Norton Utilties 15.0 wipe the cluster tips when cleaning free space?
Does Norton Ghost 15.0 or Symantec System Recovery Desktop Edition 2011 have any tools to wipe cluster tips of active files?

NotaCanada 

[DaveH]

I don't see how it would make a difference unless you were copying every single sector.

Using the setting "smart sector copy" it only images the files that are present in the MFT.  It wouldn't include any free space or deleted data.

But if you were using a product that did a full forensic copy then yes, your idea of using a repeating pattern would definatly help the compression.

BTW- I used eraser for many years and I also hate the new version.

Dave

[philipm785]

Dave, I'm probably way out of my depth here, but I think the issue at hand is that the Ghost filter driver has limited resolution (4096 bytes) and thus it knows which cluster (or group of clusters) has been made "dirty" by a change, but doesn't necessarily know which portions of the cluster contain the files in question. Therefore it backs up the entire cluster if the filter driver bitmap shows that it was written to. To the degree that certain clusters are only partially filled with useful data, and the non-useul portion is zerod out, it seems possible that the overall compression ratio could potentially be improved. 

[DaveH]

Thanks, I understand the idea now.  I guess it depends if Ghost really does a sector by sector copy or if it's actually doing a cluster by cluster copy.

I'm interested in trying it when I can find some time.

Dave