Customer Reviews

DriveScrubber - Up to 3 PCs

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

I am getting rid of my Pentium Desktop that has Windows XP. Drivescrubber worked fine for over-writing DELETED areas and FREE SPACE on my C: drive. It also worked fine on my D: drive which was a partition of C:. But when I used the option to delete and overwrite my System files things hit the fan. I was supposed to get a DOS prompt giving me options etc. Instead the thing got stuck with the DOS screen showing a message, "Loading .......". Well, just for kicks and being that it was DOS I allowed it to go on for 10 hours! Nothing happened. One of Iolo's "Help" screens said to check the Bios and ensure that the slot with the reboot disk was the first one to reboot. I did this and it was the first drive to reboot. Sent emails to the help desk. I heard from them after 24 hours telling me to "check your BIOS for the boot drive". Something I had already done. Tried to call - got nowhere but reminded me of Al Bundy on hold trying to get parts for his Dodge. Checked out all their online Knowledge base. Found nothing that would help. Finally doing a search on Google I found folks with the same complaint.

If you need a scrubber for your deleted areas this product will work fine. But if you need to clean out your ENTIRE C: drive before donating or selling your Desktop beware. Finally this morning, I decided that I had wasted enough time trying to get this thing to work so I removed my hard drive and now I have a paper weight. I am going to take the rest of my Desktop to a recycling center. I paid $19.95 for this product plus hours wasted. Live and learn.

Very happy with this product. Had an old Dell (with Windows 2000) that I wanted to recycle, but it several years' worth of 1040 forms on it that I wanted to wipe. Great thing about this tool is that were several options to run the app; my CD drives weren't working properly, and I had no internet connection anymore on the machine, but I was easily able to set-up and run Drive Scrubber in MS-DOS. It took roughly 20 hours for the app to overwrite each sector of the machine seven times, but it did a great job -- computer was totally clean when I rebooted after completion. My Drive Scrubber box also had a $10 mail-in rebate sticker on it, so I'm giving four stars until I'm sure that's processed. ;-)

Even on a computer that had gotten slow as molasses, it did a great job! I just put the CD in and it took over. It was easy to use. You don't need to connect your mouse. You will be using your keyboard keys to select actions.

I have repeatedly "tried" to use this product so I could donate a work computer to a school. Multiple telephone calls and e-mails to Iolo Technologies resulted in more wasted time with the same result. I was not able to use this product at all or donate my computer. This product, and the customer service from Iolo Technologies, is guaranteed to waste your time. DO NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT. I have never been so frustrated by software and the lack of customer service in trying to resolve what should be an easy fix. Unreal...

Just to let you all know, this product REQUIRES INTERNET ACCESS! I have a desktop and I don't have internet at my house, so I could not use this item. I bought software to clear my computer because I didn't have internet where I could find something to download to do the same thing. It doesn't say in the description that it requires internet. Needless to say, I am very disappointed.

DriveScrubber is easily the best file security utility available. It has tons of features and tools that will give you the reassurance that you can erase all private data and get rid of that old computer once and for all!

Great product, easy to use and I have never had the program conflict with any of my other software. Since you can use it on 3 PC's, it ends up being very affordable. I'd strongly recommend its overall performance to anyone.

Abysmal product and customer service. I have yet to get the product to work, at all.
When I called customer service, they told me my computer is the problem.
I am an above average tech with many years of computer hardware and configuration experience.
They do not give any specific instructions on how to troubleshoot any difficulties.
Just, "It's your problem not the software's." Hmmmmm.
Lost my money. Ended up using a free wiper in the end. Worked good and it was free.

What riles me is that IOIO Technologies had the nerve to email me saying that this program I purchased a few days earlier "Drive Scrubber" did not protect me from some secret file (which they did not name) that was automatically recording everything I did on the computer for as long as I owned it. They implied that even using the "Drive Scrubber" to completely clean the whole drive of all programs and all data would not necessarily destroy this hidden file. Apparently, only the additional program they are offering me, at the discounted price of $19.95, would actually secure my privacy.

The name of the IOIO program that is supposed to actually provide privacy (after I have foolishly wasted my money on "Drive Scrubber") is named: "System Mechanics Enhanced Privacy Cleaner." They claim that only this program will protect me from "an activity log that anyone with basic and easily accessible tools can view your activities months and even years earlier."

Who can we trust? Maybe the only safe thing to maintain our privacy, when transferring ownership of a computer, is to cook the hard drive in a pressure cooker and afterwords, beat the heck out if it with a sludge hammer.

The Windows Recycle Bin has saved many a person who deleted files and quickly regretted having done so. The ability to recovery deleted files is a welcome feature. But what if you really want to completely wipe a file or drive so that it is unrecoverable? Most people would simply reply that all you have to do is empty your Recycle Bin. The truth is that it is much harder to completely delete a file. In fact, it is extremely hard to do if one does not have the proper tools.

Data can indeed be recovered long after it has been erased. If you want to know the technical details about this, check out Peter Gutmann's seminal paper on the topic, "Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory," at [...]

[...]

In technical terms, these topics deal with the concept of data remanence, which is that data will continue to reside on a drive, even though it has been presumably erased. The security issue with data remanence is that it can easily make disclosure of confidential data possible if one gets physical access to the drive. To counteract the problem of data remanence, drive wiping was created to permanently remove all data.

There are many ways to permanently make data unavailable. The most drastic is the actual destruction of the drive. A less drastic way is to use software such as DriveScrubber 08 to wipe the disk such that any sort of data recovery is impossible. This need is so significant that the US Department of Defense created a standard (DoD 5220.22-M) on how to permanently wipe data, and DriveScrubber supports that.

Last year, security researcher Simson Garfinkel purchased a number of used computers on eBay. On those hard drives that were not wiped, he found thousands of credit-card numbers and financial records, along with medical information, trade secrets, and other highly personal information.

The bottom line is that if you have personal data on a storage device, you need to wipe it before you trash it.

The need to properly wipe data is so important that there is an organization created around it--the National Association for Information Destruction [...]. Without wiping tools such as DriveScrubber 08, it is nearly impossible to effectively wipe your drives clean of confidential data. If you buy and sell computers, or if you need to remove data that you want no one to see, it is imperative to use wiping tools that make data recovery impossible. If your drives get into the wrong hands, they may use data recovery software to get to your data. If you wipe the drive first, all their efforts will be for naught. Once your effectively wipe the drive, all data from every sector will have been eliminated.

I have tried to erase the hard drives of two different computers with this product and have been frustrated both times. The first failed attempt was on a computer with a Windows ME operating system that was just too old for this program -- OK c'est la vie. Now I have tried it again on a newer machine -- one that I no longer have a use for because it is painfully slow and has had some networking problems. Using the Drive Scrubber installation disc,I was prompted to enter a user ID and serial number, neither of which I have any longer. The installation process does provide a hotlink I can click entitled "I lost my information" but -- guess what -- if you click on that link it wants to solve the problem via connecting to the internet. Well, one of the reasons I am trashing this computer is that it has never networked very well. So to use Drive Scrubber, I would actually have to work on my computer, fixing it so it will connect to the internet. Now there's a great use of my time -- fix a computer that I actually want to throw out. So, Iolo, congratulations -- you have protected your product from unauthorized use by someone who actually purchased it but who will not buy another Iolo product.