I’m not personally familiar with cipher.exe
, but based on a quick scan of the info on this page, it seems that this tool may be applicable only if your system uses EFS, and also, that it erases your entire disk (not just a folder). Furthermore, as the cipher.exe
tool evidently dates back to 2001, it is unclear whether it is designed to work with SSDs.
If you are using an SSD, it is difficult/impossible to overwrite a specific block of the drive, because wear-leveling and over-provisioning processes will just shift the data around to other blocks. On the other hand, if you trust that the drive controller’s TRIM function is correctly implemented and that no unauthorized drive access will occur before the TRIM operations are scheduled, then you may not need to take any extra action to eliminate traces of deleted data.
Furthermore, if your system already uses whole-disk encryption (e.g., using Bitlocker or VeraCrypt), then the risks associated with deleted data are significantly reduced.