Recycle Computers; Not Data
Make sure you effectively clean your computer of personal data, corporate information, etc. when you decide to get rid of your system.
By Bill Margeson
You’ve seen them sitting along curbs or at the end of driveways. Those once mighty and powerful computers are now obsolete. Don’t let your computer data become someone else’s treasure.
Businesses and individuals often don’t take the necessary precautions to eliminate information from hard drives when they dispose of their computers. The simple deletion of a file or reformatting of your hard drive doesn’t mean the data has been rendered inaccessible.
Earlier this year a laptop computer was purchased on eBay which contained personal information regarding Canadian Alliance party members. Yikes! Remember, data needs to be destroyed, especially when computers are “recycled.”
Until data on your hard drive is actually overwritten by new information, it can be recovered by programs that read disk sectors directly. The only infallible ways to destroy data or make it completely inaccessible are to degauss, wipe the drive, overwrite files or to simply destroy the storage media itself.
Data wipe programs erase the drive and eliminate the possibility of resurrecting data. CBL Data Shredder for Windows is a free application which provides a variety of destruction techniques of differing levels of security and convenience including the RCMP DSX Method and the U.S. Department of Defense Standard 5220.22-M.
CBL Technologies is a leading data recovery service in Markham, ON. CBL Data Shredder can be downloaded for free from www.cbltech.ca/data-shredder.html
2600 John Street, Unit 207, Markham, ON L3R 3W3 T: 905.475.5222 F: 905.475.6369
