Protecting Your Valuable Information

There are certain things you should not do if you decided to replace or sell your hard drive mainly because people might get a hand on your valuable information stored on your disk even if you formatted you hard disk.

• Don’t just delete all your data and empty the recycle bin
• Don’t just format your  hard drive
• Don’t just format and reinstall your Windows or other operating system

Formatting your hard drive doesn’t mean that all the files inside your drive is gone. When a file or files is deleted, the FAT or MFT tells your computer that there is a available space on the hard drive, however the actual files is not really removed from your drive until it is overwritten with a new data. This is also the reason why it is still possible to recover your deleted files even if it is emptied on your recycle bin or even if your hard drive is formatted using a software recovery tool.

Below are the procedures that you can use to erase or destroy your data so the average individual won’t be able to recover anything from your computer hard drive.

Use Wipe Utilities

You can use wiping utilities to completely erase all your data on your hard drive  and to prevent data from being recovered. I recommend the following free tools to sanitize or wipe your hard drive of information:

• Darik’s Boot and Nuke
• Eraser
• Active@ KillDisk

Use this tools if you plan on giving your computer away, selling it, or otherwise disposing of it, please destroy the data on it by using one of the above wiping utilities.

Degauss your Hard Drive

This is a very effective step but very expensive. The degaussing process uses a magnetic field device to scramble all the electronic data on your hard drive to make it unreadable. Unfortunately degaussing machines are very expensive, this is also a not realistic purchase for the average consumer. But you can send your hard drive to a company that provides degaussing services for only a few dollars. this is a wise step if your security is very important.

Physically Destroy your Hard Drive

This is bay far the most effective method. Anyone can do this even a the average person that wants to ensure full security on their data. However, this is a dangerous method that is not recommended to everyone. If you  decided to use this method you must perform all the safety precautions, to safely do this please wear any protectective glasses and gears, also wrap the hard drive in a towel so parts will fly off and prevent to do anymore damages.

Conclusion

If someone tells you such as a computer store staff, consultant, technician that your hard drive is crashed, unusable and all the data are unrecoverable, ask them to return to you the original drive so you can physically dispose it to ensure your security.

Related posts:

1. What Computer Forensics Experts Can Find
2. My Files are back! – How to recover deleted files
3. Computer File Recovery FAQ’s
4. Protecting Your Online Account
5. Prevention is Better than Cure – Ways to Backup your Data
6. A Free Tool to Recover Your Deleted Files
7. How to recover your hacked Yahoo! account
8. Backup solution – How to change the location of My Documents folder
9. Hard Drive Failure Signs
10. Protecting your account – Choosing the best Password