1/3 of Discarded Hard Disks Contain Sensitive Data

Inc. magazine recently published an article stating that 34% of discarded hard disks contain either someone’s personal data or commercial data that a company would not want released. The study was conducted by purchasing random used hard disks and computers from EBay.

Many people believe that simply deleting files from a hard disk is sufficient. Unfortunately, this is not the case. When you delete a file from your hard disk the data is actually still present on the disk. The operating system just does not “see it” anymore. Even reformatting a hard disk does not actually remove the data from it. Anyone with an inkling to do so can still retrieve information from the disk. We do this often to help clients recover files they have deleted by accident.

The next time you are ready to discard an old computer, make sure it wiped clean. One tool that will do this is a solution called WipeDrive.

Ryan Williams

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