Hard Drive Erasure Service
We've all heard about identity theft. There's the story of the man who thought his hard drive had been safely disposed of receiving an email from a person in Latvia who had his hard drive, complete with recovered personal information. The email contained one of the man's own photographs as proof- and the hard drive itself contained bank statements, a mortgage application and much more. All perfect fodder for identity thieves to have a field day!
If you're planning on "wiping" your hard drive yourself, read our FAQ below. We can either dispose of your hard drive or return it to you, and we'll do it safely and securely for a low price!
Also remember that physically "destroying" your hard drive might not always be as effective as you'd hoped- simply damaging the controller board or sockets won't help, as these can be replaced by a determined identity thief.
Data Destruction FAQ
Q: When I send a file to the recycle bin, it's gone... right?
A: Definitely not! Remember that the whole point of the recycle bin is that you can get files back easily if you change your mind.
Q: Okay, so if I delete a file permanently using Shift-Delete, is that okay?
A: No. When you "delete" a file, Windows removes it from the disk's catalogue of files, and treats the space it took up as empty or reusable. But it doesn't actually overwrite or remove it! The file might be overwritten in the future, when Windows needs the space, but until then, the file is still there! Many tools for Windows can recover "deleted" files if they haven't yet been overwritten.
Q: This is a nuisance! Will formatting the drive (or partition) remove all its data?
A: Depends on whether you do a "quick format" or a "full format":-
"Quick format" will not permanently remove data, for a similar reason to file deletion (above). Quick format resets the catalogue so that all the space is marked as "empty", but it doesn't actually overwrite it. That's why it's quick! Until it's overwritten, old data can still be recovered from a quick-formatted drive.
"Full format" is better because it actually overwrites (and checks) every sector of the drive. But remember that it's a drive formatting utility, not a data removal tool, so this isn't guaranteed secure.
Basically,
if you want your hard drive permanently wiped so that other people can't access your personal data, we recommend that you use a specialised utility designed for the purpose. This is what we do here at Disk Depot, so if you don't want the inconvenience of doing this securely yourself, let us do it for you!
The best bit is that once the data has been permanently removed, you can reuse the hard drive again or even give it to someone else without fear of your data being recovered.
