What is and Importance of "Free disk space"

Free space is any sector/cluster that is not used by a current file. When a file is deleted, the clusters it used to use becomes part of the free space.

Free space can be anywhere on the disk. Defrag routines try and put files together, and so after a defrag, most free space will be at the end of the disk.

To add to the above, free disk space can contain remnants of files previously stored on the disk or, in fact, complete files which have been deleted. These would include temporary files created by various programs including e-mail attachments, Microsoft Office documents, instant messaging files, web pages, cookies, etc.

To determine the significance of what you find in free space may require that you locate (if possible) the actual start of the file which may be in a different cluster than the data that you have found (the SSN data). It may not even be a contiguous cluster (if the file was fragmented), or the starting cluster may have been overwritten.

With US SSN searches you can get a lot of false positives so you should be prepared to establish that what you have found are, indeed, valid SSNs (there are various ways to do this). Once you have, you'll need to establish some reasonable hypothesis as to how these happened to end up on the computer and in free space.

That is where the fun begins.

seanmcl wrote
With US SSN searches you can get a lot of false positives so you should be prepared to establish that what you have found are, indeed, valid SSNs (there are various ways to do this).

I used some of the sites like http//www.ssnvalidator.com/ to know if a found value is valid SSN or not…
Plz tell me if these sites are safe to use to and if so let me know the other sites as well.

Thanks in Advance
Sudha

I would suggest the Social Security dot gov website
Social Security Number Verification Service