Completely remove private data - Security

Name: Is my old data safe
Category: Security
Operating System: All
Difficulty: Easy

What is this about..?

Sometimes we sell our computer, replace hard drives, or throw out our old computer. In most of these situations we format our hard drive and think all our old data will be unrecoverable or we might not even do anything at all.

Is my data safe...?

What I am going to say might shock some of you. When you format your hard drive anyone with even slight computer skill can recover most if not all of it! Shocked? Formatting does not remove the old data completely until the computer needs the space to write a new file to. This means your old data is still available to everyone. Imagine some grubby person going through all your files, photos and documents - not very nice is it?

What can I do about it...?

Fortunately there are many people that have been worried by this problem and this means that there are some great free programs that will completely remove private data on your hard drive.

• Darik's Boot and Nuke - a program that can be booted from floppy or CD and will completely erase a hard drive
• Eraser by Heidi Computers Limited
• Active@ KillDisk - more complex program for exerienced users
  

The instructions for these programs are all included on these sites and there are heaps of help files for them on this Internet.

Other options...?

The other options you have are physically destroy the hard drive with a sledgehammer or pay for someone to Degauss the hard drive. Degaussing is when the magnetic media is erased using a reverse magnetic field to scramble the electronic data and make it unreadable. It will cost you a few dollars, but you can be sure that your data will be safe. You can search companies that do this with google.