When Erasing Your Hard Driver is Not Enough

Whether you work for a company with proprietary secrets, you have extensive financial records stored on your computer, or you conduct personal research of your own, you must take steps to erase this information from your hard drive to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands. Many product ideas have been stolen and many identity thefts has commenced from users failing to permanently remove their sensitive information from hard drives.

Deleting the information from your hard drive is not enough. These days, recovery programs facilitate the retrieval of nearly everything that you delete, and there is virtually no such thing as information that is gone forever. However, when you are done with a computer, you can take steps to make sure that no one can recover the information.

The first step is to save any information that you still need on an archival DVD or DVD R media. This will help you retain the information for your records or to facilitate transferring the information to your new computer.

After you have removed the needed information, you will have to take steps to destroy your hard drive. This will prevent you from reselling the computer, except perhaps for parts, but it will prevent anyone from retrieving the information. A computer repair shop can do this for you efficiently and inexpensively, offering you peace of mind that your information is truly inaccessible to anyone who finds your hard drive in the trash or who purchases your computer for its parts.

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