Is it Safe to Throw Your Old Hard Drive Away?

As criminals rely more and more on computers, government agencies have found it increasingly necessary to be able to recover information on the old hard drives of confiscated computers. There are teams of FBI forensic experts who have digital tools to recover this information.

When a file is put into the trash or recycle bin on your computer, it does not really disappear from your storage device. Your operating system can’t find it any more but it is still on the hard drive.

There is a technique called "scrubbing" which causes the data on the hard drive to be written over several times and tries to make it impossible to read. But if the file isn’t written over enough times, there are forensic tools that can even recover the data after the scrubbing.

People who steal your identity know that most of us do not know how to completely eliminate the data on our hard drives. These thieves can steal your identity from your old thrown away computers.

You can delete your files and empty the Recycle Bin but that does not permanently remove your information. You can reformat your drive, but that does not erase all your data either.

The best way to completely remove the data from your drive is to write over it with other information. Do you remember the old cassette tapes that are rarely used today? When we wanted to erase them, we used a magnetic tape eraser and erased the data or music on the tape and then it was empty. Then came the video cassettes. The only way to erase them was to record over the information on the tape. The same is true of a hard drive. The data has to be written over. There are several programs available that can overwrite your drive effectively. They can be found with the search program on the Internet.

If you want to erase all the data, you need to use a wipe program. It will clean up the drive and free up hard drive space. These programs write over your information with characters that will make the information on the hard drive very hard to recover. These programs are also called shredders. There are shredder programs that you can install on your computer that you can use to shred any files you delete as you delete them. Then if you ever decide to clean the hard drive a lot of the data will already be covered up.

We need to do everything we can to protect our identity from identity thieves. Making sure no one can read the information an old hard drive is one effective way of protecting your identity.