Secure delete doesn't delete folders

[Monkey]

HI,

I’m using the trial of the latest version, with a view to purchasing later. I noticed that when using the secure delete function, often (not always), the contents of subfolders are not deleted, and the containing folders are left, which seems an odd thing to happen.

I did some googling and found that a bug report about this was done by one of the admins here back in 2017. Is there a way to fix this? I saw the setting for subfolders, but the warning put me off using it, is that the setting I need?
Finally, what does the secure delete actually do to the data?

I’m using Windows 10, fully up to date. The drive is a 2TB Seagate Backup+ formatted with exFAT. Axcrypt 2.1.156.0 installed, but nothing encrypted as of yet.

[SvanteSpectator]

Hello Monkey,

Yes, for subfolders to be included you should enable the ‘include subfolders’ option. The reason there’s a warning is simply because it’s easy to make mistakes and with this option enabled, the consequences are potentially so much greater.

Subfolders themselves may not be deleted if they contain for example hidden or system files which are excluded from deletion buy AxCrypt. Once again to protect from dangerous mistakes.

The secure delete function opens the file for write, and then writes a random sequence of bytes over the entire file, flushes everything to disk and the deletes the file.

[Monkey]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply.

I’ve been doing some more testing of encryption and secure deletion and have another couple of questions.

With the subfolders setting enabled, I can secure delete subfolders most of the time, but not always, often I have to go back and manually delete the empty folders.   Another thing that keeps happening is that I get a pop up screen telling me that a file is write protected when it isn’t, AxCrypt completely refuses to delete it, but if I right click and delete through windows or send to recycle bin, it works first time.

The other issue I’m having is when encrypting large backup folders of images, there are many subfolders, but if I right click the main containing folder from the root of the drive (it’s just a USB3 2TB Seagate drive with exfat format) and click encrypt, it does not encrypt anything in the folder, but AxCrypt is showing that it is busy and it is using 75% CPU.  At first I thought it was just doing it’s thing in the background, but I left it 2 days and it did not encrypt anything in that folder.  I have the same folder on an NTFS formatted drive and it does the same thing on that, too.  If I open the folder and then highlight everything in it and right click>AxCrypt>encrypt, it seems to work fine.

The folder is almost 300GB in size, I have another large folder and some of the files in that were encrypted and some not, so in the end I closed AxCrypt via task manager and started again as the 75% CPU had returned.

Are these things fixable?  Thanks!

 

[SvanteSpectator]

Hello Monkey,

Thanks for the information. We’ll have to investigate and see if we can reproduce this. It is known that AxCrypt needs to be improved for large amounts of files and folders.

I’ve added your findings to the following issue: https://bitbucket.org/axantum/axcrypt-net/issues/315/performance-problems-with-10000-files-in .

[Monkey]

Thanks again, Svante, one thing I forgot to mention is that the recent files tab of the AxCrypt main screen only shows the first 4-6 files that have been encrypted and then stops completely, I’m not sure if this is related to the other issue, but I’m letting you know about it, in case it is.  Completely stopping AxCrypt via task manager and restarting it again starts it off, but then it stops again after 4-6 files on average, today it only managed 3.

[Author]

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