When you want to dispose of a computer or hard drive, it is crucial to know how to securely delete the data on the device so that no one can recover it. Many innocent people have been swept up in criminal investigations because they played amateur detective with their old devices. Deleting files or formatting a hard drive will not do the job. You must overwrite all of the storage space on a disk to prevent this from happening.
The question of how to securely erase data from hard drives has been plaguing computer users for decades. Only recently have researchers found a way to retrieve information that had previously been considered permanently erased. The main problem is that the data isn’t actually being deleted, but instead being recorded elsewhere on the drive. Researchers found an easy fix to this problem in “Track Eraser,” which overwrites all sensitive data on a hard drive with randomized ones, guaranteeing that nobody can ever get them back again.
Many people don’t realize that once a file is moved to the Recycle Bin it cannot be retrieved. If data on your hard drive is so sensitive that it can never be captured, you might want to delete the files without saving them in the Recycle Bin first. You can do this by going to Start and selecting Computer. From there, go to Local Disk (C:) and then drag and drop files into the trash icon.
