Predictions of the paperless office never came to pass. The number and variety of storage media simply expanded. Still, shredding paper, breaking floppy disks and CDs or DVDs is easy. But what do you do with your hard drive when it’s replaced, and should you bother?

Tackling the second part of the question first, the short answer is: yes. In fact, it’s even more important to manage the data on your obsolete hard drive than ever. Thanks to technological advances, it’s almost as easy to get data off a discarded hard drive as it is to read a piece of paper that’s been thrown away.

Most of the data may be of no concern. No one usually cares very much about your photos, old to-do list and other items. But your hard drive often stores archived emails, financial documents in electronic form and other juicy data that criminals would love to have. Once they have your Social Security number and credit card account number it’s often very easy to go shopping online or even apply for a replacement credit card.

But protecting old data on a hard drive isn’t as easy as shredding a piece of paper. Even erasing all the files won’t do the trick. Systems have unerase programs that will bring them right back.

Even if you’ve gone beyond emptying the Trash Can, the data is still there. It’s just hidden from view and the space is potentially reusable. But if the area on the hard drive where the sections of file are stored are never reused, the data is still there and easily recovered.

The Operating System may tell you that the data is gone, but the pattern of 1’s and 0’s it read to you in human-readable form before is still there. Programs are available that can easily decode them into meaningful information. Hackers do this all the time.

Taking the next step of formatting the drive is good. That helps remove the pattern. But many format programs still don’t erase the full pattern, only a kind of Table of Contents (called a file system pointer chain or tree). The data is still there and potentially recoverable. It only requires a modestly greater amount of cleverness.

A low level format may not even do the trick. To really be sure the data is gone you need at least to magnetize the drive. That’s hard to do when it’s in the case. You’ll often read warnings not to get a magnet near your hard drive for fear of losing your data. That’s valid advice, but it often only damages part of the data. That means the rest is still recoverable.

Some commercial devices are available that will thoroughly remove any trace of patterns that could be decoded into information. They perform extra low level formats and/or de-magnetize all the so-named magnetic domains on the drive.

Physical destruction is the most reliable method of all. That can be tough to do at home. Drives are designed to be robust, in case the computer is dropped, for example. But it’s possible to disassemble the drive or to hire a hard drive destruction service from a company. You mail or deliver the drive and they take care of the rest.

If your data is confidential, it’s worth the effort to ensure that it stays that way.

Related posts:

1. Beyond Shredding
2. Candidates for Shredding
3. Shredding & Medical Records, Do’s and Don’ts
4. Shredding and the Law
5. Shredding & Identity Theft

Give us your rating of this article below!

Trackback URI | Comments RSS