“How I can wipe my hard drive permanently?” is one question which has bothered a lot of people when decided to recycle or dispose of their computer and other devices like USB flash drives, CD or DVD, storage devices, etc.
This is because these devices contain personal files and data, and if it gets into wrong hands, then it can create a great mess.
Now, the most common thing which most of the people does for formatting the hard drive is to delete it and clear the browsing history.
However, that’s not the right solution because the delete button doesn’t completely delete the data.
In fact, deleted data is easily retrievable through the hard drive, and anybody who has the recovery software can access it within a few minutes.
Therefore, you need to wipe your computer to erase your data completely.
Now, there are some steps which need to be followed to erase data from hard drive which are as follows:-
Always Take Back up of Hard-Drive Data
- Take complete back-up of hard drive data when you are switching to a new computer or any other device. In fact, make it a practice as it will help you to make sure that your data remain safe.
- Moreover, there is a lot of chances to hard drives can crash, get losing data’s.
- Maybe stolen your disk drive, or encrypted by some kind of ransomware software.
- Thus, having back-up is extremely crucial. And, apart from devices, you can take back-up on “Cloud” also which is a network of remote servers.
Use Special Software Programs to Wipe Hard-Drive Data
- You can look out for some special software programs for permanently deleting the data from the hard drive. The software performs and overwrites for all the deleted files changing with zeros, and after that, no software can recover these files.
- Most of these programs provide a complete report regarding the cleaning of data as solid proof of erasure.
Wiping The Hard Drive Physically
- In case you don’t want to opt for any of these above-mentioned methods, then you can physically wipe your hard drive. For doing so, remove your hard drive from the system and put up a magnet on it.
- It will deform the drive’s metal plates. Also, you can use a screwdriver to dismantle your hard drive into pieces.
Re-Installing The Operating System
- If you don’t have time and resources for doing any of the things mentioned here then just simply install a new and different operating system.
- This will rewrite the whole hard drive and completely remove your personal files and data.
- So, these are some of the best security options and methods to wipe your hard drive and keeping your personal data safe from cyber-crime or theft.
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