BleachBit [Privacy oriented file cleaner]

[guinness]

Waiting intently

[webfork]

I was surprised when Bleachbit showed up in the news yesterday. Their site even has it's own "press" tab now: https://www.bleachbit.org/press

I was further surprised when the author of Bleachbit went on the record (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BleachBit) as saying that his program was definitely used to permanently remove information. I've never used it for anything but beyond a basic system cleanup of temp files and I wouldn't use Bleachbit to delete a PST file. Microsoft programs are notorious for not keeping data in one place so zapping just one file is bad security. Additionally, PST deletion isn't even in the default program. You have to take quite a few extra steps:

1. Go under Preferences - Custom
2. Navigate to the file
3. Check the Free Disk Space box towards the bottom of the program list where it gives you a warning that this is going to take a long time.

There are a variety of programs better suited to this task. I'd probably start with Eraser for scheduled wiping (http://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=267) or EraserDrop (http://www.portablefreeware.com/forums/ ... f=4&t=5425).

Whatever the case, it's some good advertisement for a great privacy tool.

[Midas]

Topic update: BleachBit v4.6.0 released 2023-11-05 (announcement at https://www.bleachbit.org/news/bleachbit-460).

BleachBit has been natively portable for some time now, with a portable version being offered for download from the official site:

• https://www.bleachbit.org/download/windows

Please note that according to user DzejPy (confirmed! Also in "Known Issues") the latest version portable package is missing the required 'msvcr100.dll' dependency.

A privacy-related feature of BleachBit I haven't seen mentioned before is "chaff":

For aircrafts, chaff is a physical countermeasure that confuses radar by making it seem like there are additional aircraft in the sky, and chaff protects the aircraft by misdirecting radar-guided missiles. Likewise, BleachBit version 3 introduces a basic chaff system that creates files to confuse digital forensics. Think of it also like the metaphor of the needle in the haystack. The needle represents the files you want to keep private, and the chaff is the haystack that makes the needle difficult to find because the forensic investigator has more junk to sift through before finding all the needles.

@ https://docs.bleachbit.org/doc/chaff.html

FYI, if you want BleachBit Portable UI to default to English instead of whatever locale it's coming up in, (as per the FAQ page and this forum thread) just rename the 'share\locale' sub-folder...

Also, Winapp2.ini cleaner info is at https://docs.bleachbit.org/doc/winapp2ini.html & https://www.bleachbit.org/forum/winapp2-updates.

[dmiranda]

Thanks for this, Midas. Manual updates of winapp2 have not worked for me (i know the drill, share\celaners folder etc). I downloaded this latest version (https://www.bleachbit.org/download/windows), updated winapp2, copy the relevant scripts to my share folder. Launched the old 2.2.0.0 version, and the scripts were there, working flawelessly (for what I can tell). So first, this latest version (portable) works in XP, it is able to download the adequate scripts. Those scripts, once passed into 2.2.0.0 share\cleaners folder work well. Cheers!