Prevent Restore

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on February 20, 2009

As its name suggests, Prevent Restore keeps others from restoring deleted files by filling in unused sectors on your hard drive. It worked as promised, but it took a long time to do its job.

Each time we tried to access the program through the desktop icon, we received an error message. We were able to bypass it and move on to the user interface, but it was a mark against the program. Prevent Restore comes with a wizard that makes it especially easy to get started. First, it asked us to select which disk we wanted to run the program. Second, we had to choose what to do with the deleted file space: replace with random characters, spaces, or random digits. During our tests, we opted to check our C drive and to replace the file sectors with random characters. The whole process took about an hour, and our computer's performance slowed down so much that we couldn't do anything else. As the program was wrapping up, it told us to ignore any messages stating that we had run out of disk space. But once it finished, we found that it successfully filled in the unused sectors with random digits.

Novices beware, though. A Help feature isn't included with the program, and you won't find much guidance on the publisher's site either. When we uninstalled the program, it did leave an empty folder in our Start Menu. However, if you don't mind surrendering your computer for an hour or so, this is a worthy tool for preventing file recovery.

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Publisher's Description

From PrivacyRoot:

Prevent Restore program is to make deleted files and folders unrecoverable. It is made as Wizard program and will be friendly for any computer newbie. "Prevent Restore" will overwrite all free space on your hard disks that can contain fragments of deleted files with some random data to avoid any possibility of recovery. It uses many security algorithms (you can replace deleted data with random characters, digits, spaces). While writing "Prevent Restore" fills out information to the end of each cluster, leaving no chance to restore even just one word. No deleted files, pics, videos, or other data can be recovered. "Prevent Restore" have special quick mode that can destroy deleted files locations in FAT or NTFS without wiping free space, which makes process extremely fast. Multiple languages supported for interface. This tool can also wipe Windows paging file (virtual memory cache) for top privacy.

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