Need help to remove pictures with NO CHANCE of restoration

Restorefiles · 03 Dec 2015

Hello guys, and thank you for a good forum.

I have a question that is very important to me, and I need your help.

I know that this situation sounds a bit crazy and I am not going to talk about the background of the problem I just need a solution.

Let's say a person has a computer and a few saved pictures of you that you want to remove permanently with no chance of restoring, and the person agrees to sit with you and remove them. My questions is how should the pictures be removed in a way that the person can not restore them as soon as I leave if he wanted to?

I know windows 7 have automated restore backup, so even if I remove then pictures from his computer he can still easily go into the backup and restore the pictures?

My questions is simple: How should the pictures be removed so that they are never possible to be restored by the simple windows restore system? Is there a way to remove them from the backup aswell?

Another solution might be to open the picture in paint and crop out myself and then save it again. In that case the picture is never removed but at least I am not in the picture nomore, but is it still possible to restore to old version?

I would really appreciate some help since this is a very important matter for me. Best regards

richc46 · 03 Dec 2015

With and interesting question such as this, I could not help but stop by.
First, I would download CCleaner, go to tools and select wipe drive (or something very similar) for the drive that has the pics. Run it 3 times the pics are gone for good.
To delete the back ups.
Start, control panel
click back up computer
click change settings
view back up
click on the back up and then delete.
I know I would be fairly comfortable if I wanted to get rid of something permanently using this method.
If the other individual really wanted to get the pics back, I am sure a professional could find a way.
When you delete, it is just taken out of sight. It is not truly removed until the space is used again.
Therefore, I am fairly certain Cc removed the originals, but the back up deletions are still there but not accessible.

Restorefiles · 03 Dec 2015

Thank you a lot for fast respons. What is the purpose of the cclean? I can not remove everything from his disc, only my pictures. What do you think about this approach:

Edit the pictures in paint so I am not seen, then let him keep the pictures and deleted the backup-files like you said?

Thanks a lot!

richc46 · 03 Dec 2015

I cannot give you a definite answer about paint. This matter seems rather important to you and I do not want to mislead. I do not know enough about paint and the ability to restore after it has been changed.

RolandJS · 09 Dec 2015

When you mentioned deleting the backup files, I thought wait-a-minute, than realized you probably meant you want to delete those particular picture files from within any and all backups, be they images [differential, incremental, en toto] or simply folder/file copy-backups.

And, there are numerous steps one can take to almost almost guarantee no easy recovery; can't list them right now. Success also depends upon how much explorer.exe [folder/file management], file seeking, ccleaner operations is known by the two end-users.

Stevekir · 14 Dec 2015

My Antivirus is AVG Cloud (I know, people here don't like it and I'm going to replace it). It has a feature "Permanently shred with AVG" . This seems to do what you want (having located and shredded all copies of your image). Perhaps there are other utilities that can do that.

As I understand it, deleting only removes the reference to the a file kept in an index. The file is still there and will over time be overwritten by other files. The term "shredding" implies immediate overwriting of the actual file. However, when I had a Mac, its "permanent delete" feature took much more than the few seconds taken by AVG, so you would need to make sure that any shredder your used did actually overwrite.

Me, I would open each image and mess up the part not wanted (and if Photoshop PSDs or Tiffs, check every layer) and re-save, as someone suggested. (But even then, if the messed-up image is longer than the original it might be saved elsewhere and the original merely removed from the index but still "there". Also, the problem remains of finding each image. I think it impossible to be fully sure that all images have been destroyed on digital media. In any case, could the owner of the computer which holds your images just make copies and squirrel them away?