Question: I was going through my pagefile.sys system file (as I usually do) and found a few things of note. For example:
—–BEGIN RSA PUBLIC KEY—–MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GNADCBiQKBgQCWNR3PfJy6YRwA6fUCfF7TlcP0Bz+PI0aeayOQmm1uyx/wB/MB0zweBwEvgLnbmgYzE8PUpBNtaFaY3essSMHsWko2SYkCVujKPdWhN9k8tqX/tMPn7TVUm7XAZ9A4mbgoYfX669qpguMn5QXkFEt0OFYKQo4DHJY86AJh3qawkQIDAQAB—–END RSA PUBLIC KEY——–
followed by
ntor-onion-key 4BeCRL/99541u3jcjdkwkmjhbutujjeroj34jkkjj542jqpwkag9jkf9=
I am a user of the Tor browser. I run it on its most default settings (i.e disabled disk writes, on Windows 10, latest version of Firefox, etc.)
Does this mean that Tor has failed in its objective to not write data to disk?
Answer: Does this mean that Tor saves your URLs?
No.
?
Does this mean that Tor has failed in its objective to not write data to disk?
No.
What It Does Mean
What it means is that you haven’t disabled your pagefile, which can store sensitive information which normally resides in memory. The page file is effectively a swap file for Windows once your memory becomes too full. Tor has no control over how this is configured on your system or what portions of memory are written to it.
Disable The Windows 10 Pagefile
You can disable the page file in Windows 10 by doing the following:
Open your Windows Control Panel > System settings.
Click the Advanced system settings link on the left.
Go to the Advanced tab in the System Properties window and press the Settings button.
Go to the Advanced tab in the new Performance Options window and press the Change button.
Uncheck the Automatically manage paging file size for all drives checkbox (if set).
Switch to the No paging file radio button option.
Press the Set button. Click YES to confirm the changes.
Press OK 3 times in the remaining windows.
Perfomance
As others have noted, performance can be a concern in relation to paging and use of the Windows pagefile. Particularly, disabling the pagefile can have a negative impact on performance (though this likely depends greatly on your amount of RAM and individual application usage).
As @Suma points out, encrypting the page file (as detailed in this linked answer) can be an alternative to disabling it entirely.