Identity theft is one of the major concerns digital age brings us. With most of our lives stored in our computer, we should take all necessary measures to protect and guard them, and make sure it doesn’t fall on the wrong hands. We should not only be cautious on how we utilize our information, we should also be careful in how we dispose them.

Photo Credit: Aleksey Fursov

Hitting the delete button is not enough to permanently erase your data. When you erase a file from your computer, it is not really gone. The space it occupies is only marked available for other data. The file is still present on your disk until another program writes data to that space. Until it is overwritten, it can be recovered and restored anytime using a data recovery software.

Storage media like computer’s hard disk, digital camera’s memory card, and USB disk are becoming more and more affordable these days; professionals chooses to replace them once in a while before it actually fails and cause precious data to be lost. While electronic waste are being reused and recycled, here is how we can make sure our data is not going to be.

Securely Wipe Your Hard Disks

Darik’s Boot and Nuke (”DBAN”) is a self-contained boot disk that securely wipes the hard disks of most computers. DBAN will automatically and completely delete the contents of any hard disk that it can detect, which makes it an appropriate utility for bulk or emergency data destruction.

You will need a blank CD to contain the burned the ISO image file.

The steps involves:

1. Boot the computer using the CD, and press ENTER to run DBAN in interactive mode.
2. Select the drive to wipe. Hit the space bar to confirm selection.
3. Press M to choose wiping method.
4. F10 to start the wipe.

It will take approximately 30 minutes to several hours, depending on your settings and the size of your disk, to complete the process. After the process is completed, the drive is ready to be reused or recycled.

Wipe USB Disks and Flash Memory Cards

DBAN doesn’t support removable media, like USB disks and flash drives. For wiping these media, Roadkil’s DiskWipe does the trick.

DiskWipe securely erases the contents of a disk replacing it with random data or leaving the drive completely blank. Numerous passes can be performed to ensure data is totally unrecoverable. While the program works equally well on hard disks, it can only be run inside Windows – which means, you cannot wipe the disk your OS is currently booted into.

Simply select the disk to wipe, fill it with zeros or random data, number of passes, and click Erase. That’s it!

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There are tons of programs written specifically to securely wipe your disks, what I mentioned above is the easiest and the most effective, in my opinion. If you have an easier and more effective way in accomplishing the same, please share it in the comments.

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