There are certain regulations in some countries that require the companies to dispose off confidential data in an appropriate manner so that data disclosure risk is eliminated. Even if the data is not confidential, malicious users have their way of misusing any kind of data.
The Internet Explorer cache keeps a record of every web page visited by you and is an easy way to obtain access to your credit card information or other vital information. In addition, an Outlook Express cache can give a malicious user access to your personal and professional emails. This information can be exploited in any way for personal gain.
Your hard drive may also have data such as your bank account numbers or important tax information. Therefore, it is very important to destroy this data in a manner that actually solves the purpose. Often times, people resort to measures such as burning the hard disk, throwing it in a swimming pool, or even asking their dogs to chew on it! While these may appear to be fun techniques, they do not actually get the job done.
Data recovery methods have become extremely advanced and, therefore, while theoretically it may be true that physical destruction can destroy the data, in practice, this data is still recoverable. The data recovery specialists use sophisticated tools to recover a hard drive successfully. Therefore, physical damage and data damage should not be interpreted as the same thing. Data recovery experts can recover data from physically destroyed hard disks very easily.
When was the last time you deleted a file and breathed a sigh of relief? How many times have you deleted an unwanted file and felt victorious in your heart? The following revelation can substantially mar your current relief and previous victories.
While deleting your files and then emptying your recycle bin might seem like the easiest thing to do, the files are not actually deleted. These deleted files simply get added to the free space on the disk. This free space will remain on your disk and the old data will remain intact until you overwrite on this data. However, typically, overwriting will not occur until all the remaining unused areas on the disk become full.
People tend to think that disk-formatting commands are helpful in destroying the data. Reformatting the disk simply conceals the data from the operating system. Formatting and partitioning the disk does not destroy any data that may be stored on the disk. The formatting procedure merely reorganizes the data so that it looks like free space. However, the formatted data can be easily accessed.
There are easily available tools such as Norton System Works Disk Editor and the Disk Investigator that can by far retrieve all the data from a reformatted disk. Even if you use the disk after reformatting, fragments of your hard disk files can still be recovered easily. Therefore, if you want to actually destroy the data on your hard disk, you will have to overwrite on the disk many times.
Overwriting is simply recording new data on top of the old data, which, in effect, destroys the old data. Overwriting the data ensures that even the advanced laboratory equipment is not able to read the magnetic traces of previous data. Having established the fact that overwriting will most effectively destroy your data, you must be wondering about the number of times you would need to overwrite this data.
According to technological experts, you would need to overwrite your data multiple times to ensure that it is destroyed successfully. Therefore, overwriting your data approximately 7 to 11 times should completely erase the previous data. You do not have to waste your time in overwriting the data 7 to 11 times by yourself. There is sophisticated software available in the market that can help you achieve your data destruction goal.
The software-based data destruction programs contain a special application that writes patterns of meaningless data on the hard disk sectors. This application works on the concept of binary flipping. Binary flipping is an activity wherein a binary number is written to each hard disk sector along with its complement. Therefore, if the first binary number that is written on the disk is 10101010, then the complement binary number would be 01010101. The sectors will be overwritten firstly using binary ones, then binary zeros, and then with random characters. When this procedure is repeated several times, the data will be effectively removed from all the sectors of the hard drive.
