Computer trivia

Many a times you find the necessity to destroy certain data on your harddisk, usually when the computer is being sold or discarded. This is especially important as the harddisk might contain a lot of personal information including credit card numbers, adult content etc.

Most people believe that deleting the files and then cleaning up the recycle bin will completely remove the data which is not true. When certain data is completely deleted by us, Windows just marks the space occupied this data for re-writing and this data is actually lost only when the space is re-written. In other words, even if you cleaned up the recycle bin, the data is still recoverable.

Formatting the disk is not a solution either. Even in this case the data is not erased but is just marked for reuse and thus can be recovered. Amazingly, destroying the disk physically is also no good. There were cases where data was recovered from disks which were intentionally destroyed (or thought to be destroyed).

So, if you are really concerned about completely wiping the data on the harddisk, you must get it Degaussed which removes all the magnetism from the disk. However, this is a costly solution. There are certain software solutions which will write ‘0′ on the entire harddisk and thus make the data almost unrecoverable. Try one of these solutions.

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