I am selling my old computer as I have recently as I have recently upgraded but I'm concerned
someone could still find my personal data on it. I did almost all of my banking online and also kept a lot of tax records on my hard drive. What's the best way to ensure that my data is really gone? Is this something I can do myself or should I take it in to a computer shop?
Hi friend,
There is more than one way to ensure that my data is really gone. To do this you need to use some third party utility software for it. There are many software for it. I will focus on only two software.
To erase all data from HDD permanently you can use “Active killDisk for windows 5.5.0” this will erase all data and partition and file system so that those data will be gone forever. Use kill option for this operation.
To ensure that my data is really gone you can use recovery software for check. You can use “Recover My files” for this. Run this software and perform “Fast file search” with category you will confirm about your data is really gone.
Data on a hard drive can be retrieved by some software for as long as the blocks that contained the data has not be written over by new data. That said, to be able to 'completely' wipe out an entire hard drive, all the data that has been written on it has to be overwritten. To do this, make sure you format your hard drive prior to selling your machine. You can use software that wipe the hard drive out or you can just fill the hard drive with a large amount of data (you movies perhaps) after formatting, but that's too troublesome.
You can use the Eraser software which can completely remove files and folders. You can download it here:
If the person who will be buying your computer will be very interested in your data, he can use available software that can get the data out of your hard drive even after you have formatted it and reinstalled the operating system. If he has a software that's powerful enough, he'll be able to dig up the hard drive and retrieve the data from there. Of course, these have to be elite and computer savvy people who have enough time and resources at their disposal. The safest way to go about this would be to just have a different hard drive replace the hard drive that you use on the computer. That way, you get to keep the hardware and minimize, if not eliminate, any possibilities of anybody compromising your data.
