How to find and remove "spicy" media files from my PC [closed]
I have an embarrassing problem: during my younger and wilder days, I used to download a certain type of movie clips and pictures. The combination of youthful foolishness and a couple of beers apparently caused me to put these files in odd places on my hard drives.
My girlfriend is moving in with me in a few weeks, and I am horrified at the prospect of her stumbling onto one of those files. I have been over my drives a few times, but I manage to find another of those dammed files each time. I have huge drives containing hundreds of thousands of files, most of them legitimate and work related, so I can't just format the PC. To complicate matters even more, some of the offending files are named in misleading ways.
I seriously need help here. How can I make my PC honest again?
Solution 1:
Use the other answers to remove horse porn and that icky scat stuff.
Talk to your girlfriend. Tell her that you are a normal guy who watches spicy media, drinks beer and feels embarrassed to be accused of the former. This gives you the advantage of building up communication skills and making the relationship more honest and transparent.
Tell her that she is the one and you don't really need these media files any more, she can delete them at any time herself.
Solution 2:
It is called format and reinstall. It is the surest way to do this. Backup what you know you want to keep (presumably you know where these files are) and nuke the rest.
You can always do a search for every type of media file using built in search or a third party tool (ie, searching all .jpg files in the system, or all .gif or all .mpeg, etc) and going through the results one by one, but that is time consuming and always runs the risk of you missing a certain file type.
Solution 3:
Get an external hard drive(s) large enough to hold everything good and bad. Use encryption software such as TrueCrypt to create encrypted partition(s) on the external hard drive. Copy everything good and bad onto the encrypted drive.
Reboot and test that you're able to retrieve the files from the encrypted drive.
Once you've backed up everything onto the encrypted drive, back up the headers of the encrypted drive according to the instructions of the particular encryption software.
Format and reinstall your operating system, and also format any other external drives that might have "spicy" stuff.
Copy back the non-spicy stuff onto your main hard drive(s).
Put away the encrypted hard drive in the closet. If you later find that there is a legit file that you forgot to copy in step 5, you can dig up the encrypted hard drive to look for it. Since you won't be using the encrypted drive often, you're probably going to forget the password, so make sure to have a system to retrieve the password in case you forget (e.g. the first 12 letters of the first 12 words of Chapter 12 of a certain book).
On the encrypted drive you might consider creating the first partition as unencrypted with innocent stuff on it, so it's less obvious to somebody who uses the drive that it has any encrypted data. Or you could use the "hidden volume" feature of the encryption software, if the software you choose has the feature and you're willing to deal with the extra complexity.
Solution 4:
This is a potential X-Y Problem (and I'm not talking about X and Y chromosomes). Your real objective (X) is, presumably, to maintain a healthy and successful relationship with your girlfriend and you've decided that purging your computer of all sexual content (Y) is the means to accomplish that.
Before you spend too much time and effort on Y, have you verified that it actually will accomplish, or at least contribute to, X?
In more straightforward terms, do you even know what your girlfriend's views are regarding porn in general and/or the specific flavors that you've enjoyed in the past? fungusakafungus has already advised honesty, which is imperative here. Beyond that, though, women these days are becoming increasingly tolerant of porn and, believe it or not, some of them actually like it.
Before you fall all over yourself groveling for forgiveness for having looked at other women before meeting her and swearing up and down that you'll never want to see any other woman naked again so long as you may live (trust me, no matter how much you mean it when you say it, you'll be lying), take a few minutes first to find out whether she even cares in the first place. She very well may not. Or maybe you'll discover that she's willing to show you her collection if you show her yours.
Otherwise, I have to refer back to part of Preet Sangha's answer: "If you can't talk to your partner honestly then I suspect maybe you should consider deleting or upgrading your potential partner?" Bigger issues than this will come up in any long-term relationship. If you can't talk about this, you'll be in bad shape when they do. And I maintain that any relationship which requires you to disavow your past and deny a part of yourself for the indefinite future, all out of fear that your partner might find out who you actually are, is simply not worth it.
Solution 5:
You can use Picasa to do a scan of all your media files on your computer, tag and organize them. This prevents you from having to do a reinstall and organize your media at the same time.