Accurate guidance for Steel Security Free and Steel Security Pro

Quarantine, Restore, and Permanent Delete

Quarantine is an operator-reviewed safety workflow for file findings. It is intentionally more conservative than automatic deletion.

Scanning Free Updated August 9, 2026

What this means

When Steel quarantines a file, it removes the original from the site path and stores the payload with metadata so it can be reviewed later.

Why it matters

Many sensitive artifacts should be removed from the public site tree, but administrators still need a safe recovery option in case a file was quarantined too aggressively or by mistake.

What Steel Security checks

Quarantine is used with applicable file-based findings such as `phpinfo` scripts, SQL dumps, backup archives, and similar artifacts.

Rollback / Recovery

Use the Quarantine Vault to restore a file to its original path when you are confident it should return.

Use permanent delete only when you are certain the quarantined payload should never be restored.

  • Quarantine removes the original path from the public tree.
  • Restore rehydrates the original file and removes the vault payload.
  • Permanent delete removes the stored payload and does not restore the file.

Server or hosting considerations

Steel validates paths so it does not move files outside the intended site scope.

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