How to Clean Disk Data

When selling or throwing away your old PC, be cautious of just what you’re disposing of. There are increasing incidences of identify theft occurring from the data retrieved from the victims hard disk. Sometimes not much effort is even required to obtain this personal information. It’s not too difficult for the buyer of a second hand computer to get hold of data from the machine. Whilst most of the information contained might not be of much use, there have been occasions when the data retrieved has included credit card numbers, medical records, bank account details and other private and personal details.

Before getting rid of your old computer it’s important to wipe clean the contents of your hard drive. There are various ways of doing this; five of them are listed below.

1. Delete Files and Folders

Deleting all files and folders and emptying the recycle bin is one of the most common ways of wiping all data from the hard drive. It’s certainly the easiest; however, this method of data deletion is not completely effective. The file pointer will be deleted preventing the Operating System from detecting it; however it will still exist on the hard disk. Using data recovery software these files will easily be recovered.

2. Reformat the Hard Drive

A reformat of the hard disk will delete all the files held on it. However, this procedure only destroys the structure of the data and it will still be possible to recover any information stored on it.

3. Degaussing

Degaussing involves using a powerful electronic magnet to erase any contents held on magnetic media by reversing the magnetic field.

4. Overwriting the Data

Overwriting the data on your hard drive is another method of removing information. This isn’t considered an effective way of data wiping as it may still be possible to gather information. Also, some files may remain on the disk which have not been overwritten.

5. Destroy the Hard Drive

Destroying the hard drive is one sure fire way of eliminating all the data held on it. However it is a rather drastic measure to take.

How to Wipe the Data

The five methods listed above for data wiping are not sufficient enough to completely remove files from your hard drive or any storage media. However, there is a solution to this which involves using dedicated data wiping software which guarantees the complete deletion of all data held in various types of storage media. Using this software is easy, although the actual processes the program performs are quite complicated.

The program carries out several erasing processes on the hard disk. The first task it performs is replacing all the information on the disk with random patterns of zeros and ones. Next, this pattern will be re-arranged and finally all the ones and zeros will be distributed randomly all throughout the disk. These processes will completely erase all files from the system including admin data, registry information and Windows logs. The original information on the disk will now be unrecoverable. Some software of this type also offer low level formatting and this will wipe the disk totally clean. Using a file shredder program will also have similar results. It uses the same removal methods offered by specialized data wiping programs.

If you don’t want to spend lots of money on data wiping software, then have a look around the Internet as there are many programs of this type available for free. Most of them will be just as efficient as their costly rivals. One of the most popular programs for data wiping is Erasure and it can be downloaded free from the Internet.

Data wiping can be a dull and monotonous process but it is well worthwhile to ensure the complete removal of your personal information from your hard drive. Failure to do so can leave you wide open to becoming a victim of identity theft.

Tags: clean disk, format disk