Home How to wipe your HARD drive

DESTROYING COMPUTER DATA
Ensure Complete Data Destruction & Computer Security

Leaving data on a computer is an extremely risky thing to do for a number of reasons.

On a personal level it can help a criminal steal your identity which can lead to financial loss and enormous emotional and psychological stress.

In the US it took one woman 17 years to rebuild her life after her personal details were stolen by identity thieves. The problem is now so serious in the US that help groups have sprung up to counsel the victims of identity fraud on how to recover their lives.

In the UK according to ‘Identity Fraud: A Study’ from the Cabinet Office

"An annual figure of £1.3 billion pa is the minimum quantifiable cost to the economy arising from identity fraud."


According to CIFAS, the UK’s fraud advisory service, identity theft is now the UK’s fastest growing crime.

But it does not just stop at individuals, businesses should destroy data to avoid breaking the law or being sued by a partner or employee for business or commercial loss or identity caused by leaking information that they had a duty of care under the Data Protection Act to secure.

The overall security of your company’s data is crucial to your protection:


  • To protect customer and employee privacy and prevent identity theft
  • To protect company information and shareholders by safeguarding proprietors trade information

“Delete” or “Format” does not mean Erase


Wiping computer data from a hard drive is not an easy task. A common assumption is that deleting or formatting a hard drive will be enough but in fact the data is still recoverable.

One of the first steps that you need to take is to write down how and where you store data. Do you have a policy of keeping all of your data on your network or are people allowed to take data away from the organisation on zip drives, floppy drives, flash memory sticks and PDAs?

If so you will have to put in place a policy to deal with all of those devices because they will all need to be dealt with.

Once having established where you have stored data you will have to wipe it.

There are a number of methods to “delete” data from a computer's hard drive (e.g., highlighting a file and pressing the Delete key, or emptying a recycle bin or trash folder, using system utilities to reformat the disk). These methods do not remove the data, they simply make space available for the system to use when next required. The data remains on the disk. Readily available software tools can be used to restore the data. Some are even free.

Protection Against Identity Theft