Computer After-Life – Ensuring That All Confidential Data Is Deleted

Most companies will sell, donate, recycle or even throw away their old IT equipment. However, a recent survey¹ found that they rarely check that the data has been securely eradicated before disposing of the old equipment.

Every year we hear stories of highly sensitive information being found on second-hand computers bought cheaply. In most cases, reformatting a hard drive is not sufficient to properly wipe out all information, as data recovery services or software can recover the data.

So how can we ensure that all confidential information is securely deleted before disposing of the computers?

Physically destroying the hard drive is the best way to make sure the data is gone for good. Fortunately, there are other safe ways to ensure data is securely erased. Data-erasing software products will overwrite data, with a single pass usually being sufficient. Military norms, however, require that a drive be overwritten several times. In these circumstances, even Ontrack's data recovery engineers would be unable to recover useful data. The cost to attempt such a recovery would also be tremendous.

Data-erasing software products also provide a better way of wiping out data than carrying out a low level format. Not only are they more user-friendly, but they also are more reliable. Low level formatting tools will zero-out every sector of the drive once, while with data-erasing products such as DataEraser™ you can define a number of overwrite passes (from one to ninety-nine) and select the overwrite pattern.

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¹Brits fail to dispose of data on dumped PCs, Friday 3rd September 2004, PC pro, http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/news_story.php?id=62862