Secure Hard Drive Wiping or Destruction.

Information is power! at the risk of sounding like a cliche, with power comes great responsibility… It really does not matter what your business does, you will have private data that you do not want to be seen by anyone else. Before you give your computer to your favorite uncle consider this, your data is not gone! It’s deleted, yes for sure, but is it gone? Nope! Not really… Deleting a file then emptying the Recycle Bin only removes the visibility of the file. Other factors are at play with regards to if files can be recovered or not.

We have been asked many times by many different companies, how can we share our computers with staff? How can we donate computers to charities? How can we securely destroy data?

In some situations, companies would indicate they had no relevant information on hard drives, or simply put, the information on the hard drives was not private, confidential, or did not have client information whatsoever. In this sort of situation, we would assist with a secure wipe using secure data wipe tools. Keep in mind that not all tools support wiping SSDs. The tools used would take up to 24 hours per hard drive. One of the standard ways of wiping a drive using an erasing tool is by wiping a hard drive then fully writing on it numerous times. The more times the process is followed, the lower the odds of data being recovered.

Some free tools can recover data such as Recuva can recover deleted data. Mind that, aside from saving files on the drive, Disk Deframnetation would reduce the chances of recovering intact files. Still, the chances of data recovery even with the simplest free tools are possible unless a drive is securely wiped.

In other situations we have clients requesting secure hard drive destruction! Drives are deposited in a hard drive shredder and come out the other end in bits and pieces – This is extremely secure. Clients that have patient data, financial data, proprietary data, amongst others on their computer and server systems require this type of destruction to ensure data is not leaked or accessed by unauthorized people. We visited a local recycling facility today and shredded a box of hard drives! Watch the video below!