HOW TO USE BLEACHBIT FOR WINDOWS SOFTWARE

Therefore, it may be weeks, months, or even years before that file is overwritten. (You can read more about why this causes problems for secure deletion here.) If you’re using an SSD or a USB flash drive, jump to this section below.ĭid you know that when you move a file on your computer into your computer's trash folder and empty the trash, the file is not completely erased? Computers normally don't “delete” files when you move a file to the trash, your computer just makes the file invisible and allows the space it took up to be overwritten by something else sometime in the future. Secure deletion on SSDs, USB flash drives, and SD cards is very hard! This is because these types of drives use a technique called wear leveling and do not provide low-level access to the bits as stored on the drive. These instructions apply only to traditional disk drives, and not to Solid State Drives (SSDs), which are standard in modern computers, USB keys/USB thumb drives, or SD cards/flash memory cards. From a terminal window, you can run bleachbit -l to list all available cleaners.The instructions below should only be used for securely deleting data from spinning drives. Command-Line InterfaceīleachBit has a command-line interface, too.

HOW TO USE BLEACHBIT FOR WINDOWS SOFTWARE

If you’re deleting system data to free up space, you should also check out the APT category near the top of the window to remove unneeded software packages. Just check the languages you want to keep – BleachBit will remove everything else. You can select the languages you want to keep on the Languages tab in the Preferences window. To use this feature, enable the Localizations option under System.

If you’re feeling squeezed for space, deleting language files can free up a bit. For example, on a fairly standard Ubuntu 12.04 system, BleachBit offers to delete 54MB of language files with its default settings. While this normally isn’t a huge problem and doesn’t take up a large amount of disk space, it does use some. Your system probably has localization files for a wide variety of languages on it. You’ll need to close the BleachBit window and run BleachBit normally to delete your browser data and other user-specific data. One caveat – BleachBit won’t see your personal data while running as root.

Once it’s launched, you can delete APT cache data, localizations, and other data in system directories. If you have a different partition mounted at /partition, you’ll need to add a folder inside /partition to this list. If you only have a single drive, the default settings will work fine. To enable this feature, use the Drives tab in the Preferences window to add a writable folder on each partition on your system. This overwrites deleted files that are lurking in the free disk space, ensuring files deleted by other applications are overwriten. Like CCleaner, BleachBit includes an option to overwrite free disk space with useless data. The downside is that overwriting files is significantly slower than just marking them as deleted, which is why operating systems don’t overwrite all deleted files in the first place. The files may still be recoverable if a copy of them existed elsewhere on the system and that copy wasn’t overwritten, so there’s no guarantee that the data will be completley unrecoverable if you overwrite it – nevertheless, if you’re worried about file-recovery utilities, this is a helpful feature. The overwrite option overwrites the files with useless data, preventing recovery. Programs normally delete files by marking them as deleted, leaving them on the disk for file-recovery utilities to potentially recover. This is equivalent to “shredding” files, as some programs refer to it. Instead of deleting files normally, you can go into BleachBit’s preferences window (Edit –> Preferences) and enable the Overwrite files to hide contents option. Verify that Bleachbit isn’t deleting any important files you want to keep.

You should run a preview by clicking the Preview button before running an actual Clean operation. BleachBit warns you if you select an option that’s slow or may have other problems.

How to use bleachbit for windows