Delete Data From Your Hardrive With DBAN by:Chris Holgate

This week, I felt the need to re publish an article that my web designer wrote a few years ago

. It was written about formatting files from a hard drive to make them unrecoverable. This is very important when selling a computer, giving it away to charity or just disposing of it.

I am still meeting people on a weekly basis who would happily sell their computer without deleting data properly, this is why I felt it would be worthwhile to recycle an old article of mine as it is just as relevant today.

" With data security becoming a greater issue on a daily basis it's important to make sure that you securely remove all your data from your hard drives before you decide to sell your hard drive or donate it towards a charity of your choice. For a great amount of time there have been programs available which can miraculously restore data from a damaged floppy disk, with being the token computer guy in the house at university and still people using this decidedly unreliable format I became familiar with the programs used for restoring corrupted or deleted data from the diskettes.

Technically, just deleting a file isn't sufficient to get rid of it permanently; when you delete a file from say Windows XP or any other OS you're not truly deleting the file. You will need to have a rough idea of how file allocation tables work in order to understand this properly. This is based on the current format of your hard drive. Unfortunately formatting the drive isn't necessarily sufficient as data can still be relatively easily restored using an unformatting program which are available readily on the Internet.

If you're intent on selling the drive off to a 3rd party personally I'd recommend the free tool DBAN (Darik's Boot and Nuke) which is used for securely erasing all data from your hard drive, making recovery of previous data from your drive nigh-on-impossible. DBAN performs a military grade format on your hard drive, conforming to American DOD (Department of Defence) standards.

DBAN is more effective than the conventional Windows format as it performs multiple passes over the hard drive, on each pass it will randomly flip each binary bit from a zero to a one or vice versa to completely scramble all the data on the drive. Multiple passes are required so traces of the old data are more difficult to detect. The small, free piece of software called DBAN can be downloaded from http://dban.sourceforge.net/

Note it's name "BOOT AND NUKE" - You must be careful not to lose ALL data if you want to keep some. The CD that you create will be bootable when you turn on the computer with CD booting enabled the program will load automatically. Everything on the drive, including the OS is deleted - ALL data means ALL the data.

Ryan Carson, Refresh Creations Ltd "

About the author

Chris Holgate is a director and copyrighter of the online Ink and Toner website Refresh Cartridges http://www.refreshcartridges.co.uk He writes a weekly article of all things tech related.

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