O&O FileErase Product manual

O&O FileErase 
Deletion process

Why could my deletion only be closed with a warning?
You may occasionally receive notification that deletion could only be completed with warnings. This means that some, but not all, elements marked for deletion were not able to be deleted.

There are various reasons why this happens. When deleting Windows and program files, some of these files may be needed by Windows itself. This is usually indicated in reports as “blocked by […]“. If this is caused by a program you opened, you can close it and then try deleting again. If it involves a system program, restarting the system can sometimes help. Most often, however, it’s just not possible to delete the data because the system will not unblock it.

The notice “Access denied“ in logs and reports involves files that may only be changed by the system. These are usually located in a folder that O&O FileErase indentifies as containing temporary files but not all of these files are accessible.

Why does deletion take so long?
Deletion can sometimes take many hours or even days to complete. This is always the case when:
• Large volumes of were selected for deletion
• A deletion method with many runs was selected
• The data is located on damaged hardware
• The system is being used to capacity (during a backup or other write processes, Windows updates, etc.)

What happens if I stop deletion?
If you stop deletion you can choose among the following options

Stop deletion

Stop deletion

If you click on Cancel, the program will ask, if you want to cancel immediately.
If you say Yes, the actual process will be stopped with some files still in restorable condition.
Should you say No, however, the last file will be completely removed and then the process will be aborted.
Clicking Cancel will resume the deletion process.

If, for example, you stop deletion while deleting a folder, you can expect some data to still be readable on the disk while other data cannot be recovered. It’s very probable that you’ll need to reformat the partition without any guarantee that the old data was securely deleted.