Data Removal and Destruction

Avoid Identity Theft- Destroy the Data on Your Drive

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

When I send a file to the recycle bin, it’s gone… right?

Definitely not! Remember that the whole point of the recycle bin is that you can get files back easily if you change your mind.

Okay, so if I delete a file permanently using Shift-Delete, is that okay?

No. When you “delete” a file, Windows simply removes its entry from the disk’s catalogue of files and marks the space it took up as unused. However, it doesn’t actually overwrite that space straight away. The file might be overwritten in the future, when Windows needs that space to store new files… but until then, the file is still there! Many tools for Windows can recover “deleted” files if they haven’t yet been overwritten. (This is how data recovery of “deleted” files usually works.)

This is a nuisance! Will formatting the drive (or partition) remove all its data?

Possibly. It depends on whether you do a “quick format” or a “full format”, and on whether you’re using a recent version of Windows:-
“Quick format” will not permanently remove data, for a similar reason to file deletion (above). Quick format simply wipes the catalogue, marking all the space as “unused” or “empty”, but it doesn’t actually overwrite the space itself- that’s why it’s quick! Until the “unused” space is overwritten, old data can still be recovered from a quick-formatted drive.
“Full format” is better because on Windows Vista (and later versions) it actually overwrites every sector of the drive with zeroes. (Older versions like XP check for bad sectors, but don’t overwrite). Remember, however, that it’s a drive formatting utility, not a data removal tool, and this isn’t guaranteed secure.

Okay, now I’m paranoid. Is there anything else I should know?

Hard drives regularly transfer (or “remap”) data from old, failing sectors to new unused ones. After this, the new copy is used and the old one is ignored. What’s important is that the drive does this itself- under normal use Windows doesn’t even “know” this has happened. The old sector is taken out of circulation by the drive, a “good” copy is made elsewhere with the same ID, and Windows is shown the new one. So if Windows then overwrites “all” the sectors on the hard drive, guess what? The old, faulty sectors that Windows can’t see still have the data on them from just before they went out of use and can (in theory) be recovered! More serious data erasure tools use special commands to instruct the hard drive to overwrite even those sectors.

That last bit is for those with good reason to be really paranoid though, as only a small amount of data is likely to be recoverable that way!

Even so, it does show that if you want your hard drive permanently wiped so that other people can’t access your personal data, you really ought to be using 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! Our methods give a full, military-grade hard drive erasure.

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.