I was watching the news yesterday lunch time and - like I suspect many people - was rather shocked to see how much data was being recovered from discarded, second-hand, PC’s. Presumably, non-technical folk don’t realise how easy it is to restore “deleted” data from a computer.
Whilst it’s great that the BBC is raising this problems profile, it was rather unfortunate that the BBC technical journalist being interviewed merely suggested “googling for ‘hard disk wipe software’” as the start point. OK for a sound-bite, but not really ideal, especially when their websites article links to much better detail (if a little verbose).
IF you’re disposing of an old computer, be it throwing it in the bin, giving it to a charity, or a recycling centre, it’s much much better to reformat the hard disk using something like Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN) (which is free to download and use), which you burn to a CD and then boot to when you’re about to get rid of the computer (not before!!!). The hard disk is then repeatedly overwritten. It takes a while, but by writing repeatedly over the data on your disk, it makes it impossible for anybody to recover anything or even use the computer without reinstalling an operating system. Once will be enough for most purposes, but three or more will make absolutely sure. Military requirements are a bit excessive - something like 20 times!
Mac folk aren’t immune either. Whilst we have “Secure Delete”, which ensures that the files contents are properly deleted, it’s only for the contents of files. Things such as browser cookies/caches may still be recoverable. There’s a PPC version available of DBAN for most Mac users (I’d imagine the default version works in a limited sense on the new Intel Macs).
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