Be Safe: Wipe Your Hard Drive Clean

Identity theft today is running rampant. It seems there are people out there with horrible intentions of ruining your life and then can find the information they need on your hard drive. Just deleting files will not protect you. There are simple programs that can undelete all day long. You need to completely erase (wipe) your hard drive clean.

Wiping or erasing data from hard of computer system is necessary when you are going to donate or sell your computer system—or even just your hard drive on eBay. Your confidential information like bank account, credit card information, Internet websites passwords and important documents are saved on your hard drive. Anyone can get this information so it’s better to erase or wipe this information from your storage device before donating it or selling. Some users think that deleting data by using right click or Clt+Del, delete data permanently from Windows drive. This is a dangerous perception because anyone can recover your data even if you re-formatted your hard drive. So, always wipe hard drive to erase data permanently. This will completely clean your drive of all your data. For real.

Why formatting doesn't delete data permanently? The Windows file system manages all activity of Windows on your hard drive. The file system assigns clusters to every file and folders and information about these clusters are saved inside the file system. Only the information or reference of theses clusters is deleted when a user deletes files and folders from the hard drive and the file system just marks these clusters as unused. But, the data are still present on the hard disk. These files and folders can be recovered with data recovery software. Even when you format hard drive, only the reference of all data gets deleted from the Windows file system. Whole data is still present inside hard disk.

Solution: Now, the question comes what should be done to remove all data permanently from a hard drive? Don't worry. Every problem has a solution and this one has several. To make data unrecoverable you need to overwrite whole data. This means place (0s or 1s) data in place of actual data. So, when anyone tries to recover your data he/she will get garbage data. But, the problem is that how can we overwrite drive? To overwrite data you need data eraser software. This software is designed to overwrite data with a great deal of safety. Wiping software uses some international approved standards like Zero fill, One fill etc. to wipe data from hard disk. You can select which standard you want to follow to wipe.

Stellar information system provides a wide range of drive wipe software for windows and Mac systems. It offers Windows drive wipe utilities to completely erase whole data from Windows hard disks in one mouse click. With Windows file eraser and Mac file eraser software you can erase selected files from windows and Mac operating system. These software utilities don’t affect the internal operating systems files.

Be careful and be safe. Wipe that drive before you lose track of where it is going or who gets it. If you purchase some cheap computer parts online that may have been used, check for data to wipe first.