Will Formatting Permanently Erase My Hard Drive?

Selling, recycling, or giving away your old computer? Wondering if simply formatting data will permanently erase your hard drive? Simply formatting data on a hard drive and erasing it is not enough internet security. You need to use disk deleting software to permanently erase data and files on your hard drive.

You can spend countless hours going through your hard drive and deleting all the files and y documents you want. Using your "delete" key on your keyboard in Windows unfortunately basically only removes the shortcuts to the files making them invisible to users. Deleted files still reside in your hard drive. They can easily be recovered using data recovery software, readily available for download on the Internet.

While formatting a hard drive is a little more secure than simply erasing the files, it does not permanently erase the actual data on the disk. Formatting a hard drive only erases the address tables. This makes it much more difficult to recover the files. However, a computer specialist would be able to recover most or all of the data that was on the disk before reformat, using data recovery software. This is wonderful if you have accidentally reformatted a hard drive. On the other hand though, it is not good if you're selling, recycling, or giving away your computer. With your computer in th wrong hands, crooks could steal your identity. This could lead you to becoming the next victim of identity theft, one of the fastest growing crimes in Canada and the USA.

Here's a bit of "food for thought". In 2003, two MIT students purchased 138 used disk drives from various locations. They found more than 5,000 credit card numbers, medical reports, deleted personal and corporate financial information. On top of this the two students found several gigabytes of personal email and pornography on those disks.

To securely erase data and files from your hard drive you need to use a process called disk wiping. This is a secure method of ensuring that data on your computer and other storage devices is permanently deleted. To permanently and securely erase data on your hard drive you need to use disk deleting software, also known as file wipers, shredders, and wipe programs. It is good to know that there is free disk deleting software for download on the Internet.

Disk deleting software overwrites your hard drive with 0's or random patterns. This makes it virtually impossible to recover data and files on your computer using data recovery software.

Apparently, according to an article I read in PC World, some hardware can recover data that has been written over once or twice. That is where secure delete standards, such as the Department of Defense 5220.22-M, comes into play. This specification states that overwriting the drive sector three times with specific, different characters constitutes one pass. Seven such passes are recommended by many Internet security experts to make the data completely unrecoverable.

It is reassuring that to read data overwritten by even the simplest disk deleting software requires expensive hardware to recover, so only the most determined professional sleuth would be able to recover your data.