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It is important to completely erase a hard drive before giving it away or recycling it. Simply moving files to the trash and emptying it does not completely erase the data. To ensure complete erasure, special software is needed to overwrite the entire hard drive with random data. The DoD 5220.22-M standard is commonly used by the US government, overwriting the data three times.
There comes a time in the life of most computers when the user will be faced with the need to erase a hard drive, and in some cases, it is necessary to ensure that the drive is erased completely. This can happen when giving away a computer, when you want to make sure the new user doesn’t have access to your files. It can also occur when you recycle an old computer or hard drive, to make sure no one can access sensitive documents. Or it can occur in a corporate setting, when an employee leaves and a new employee is taking over, to protect the privacy of both the employee and the company.
Whatever the reason, it’s relatively easy to completely erase a hard drive, but it takes some special tools to make sure that the data you got rid of can’t be recovered. To understand why, it’s first important to understand how hard drives work, and more importantly, how the erase key or recycle bin works on your computer. Many people think that by moving a file to the trash and deleting it, they have erased it completely, but in reality it takes a little longer to erase a hard drive or anything from it.
Hard drives consist of a lot of data, marked in different ways. Accessible files are marked on your hard drive as space in use, which means that when new files are created or existing files are modified, none of these files will be accidentally overwritten. When you move a file to the Trash or Trash and empty it, you tell your computer to change the way hard drive space is marked. The data is not actually removed, but new data may overwrite it in the future. If no data overwrites it, however, it can be recovered quite easily using special software. Even if parts of files are overwritten, it is often possible to recover enough data to reassemble large parts of documents.
To completely erase a hard drive, therefore, you must not only mark sections on the hard drive as overwritten, but also completely overwrite them. One way to do this, without special tools, is to use the disk utilities built into Windows, Mac OSX, or Linux to format your hard drive. While not complete, a full format will largely overwrite everything, providing a decent amount of erasure. This is often enough for people who just want to give their computers to charity, a friend or recycle them and don’t have really sensitive documents on them.
For businesses or government employees, however, it can be important to make sure that when you wipe a hard drive it stays wiped even in the face of devoted attempts to recover the data. To do this, you’ll need special software, known as a data dump program or disk cleanup program. This program will overwrite your entire hard drive over and over again with completely random data, ensuring that almost nothing is left of the original. Different programs and standards differ in their degrees of completeness, ranging from medium to high security forms. The most common standard, used by the US government, is the DoD 5220.22-M standard, which overwrites three times, first inscribing 1 on each bit of the unit, then 0 on each bit, and finally a government code of 246.
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