There are plenty of people who thing that the tasks required to erase hard drive data are tedious but ultimately useless
. They do not see the potential dangers of having traces of their files left in their drives after they have dispatched or discarded it in an upgrade. This is quite unfortunate as the inability to erase hard drive data opens you or your business to various security risks involving important information leaks.
To help out, here are some reminders for the situations when you should learn and start the process to erase hard drive files and data on your computer.
When selling your hard drives:
One of the more common ways for hackers or whoever else to access files from your hard drive would be to pose as buyers for second hand computer items. They would purchase the hard drive, and upon seeing that you did not properly erase hard drive data, they would then run various software programs to try and root out pertinent information about you.
That is why it would be important for you to erase hard drive data when you are selling the items to someone that you dont know. This would act as a safeguard from those that would actually want to steal money from you.
When upgrading office equipment:
When you would upgrade your office equipment, specifically the computers, then you should also try to eliminate or erase hard drive data. This is especially true if you would just store the hard drives somewhere or sell them off to collectors.
This is because there are plenty of stories about corporate espionage efforts which were successful because of recovered office spreadsheets, tables, and other documents that were found on discarded hard drives and computer equipment.
By doing a memory wipe through software specifically made to erase hard drive data, you would ensure that corporate spies sent by your competitors would come up empty in their data recovery efforts.
As you can see, taking the safeguard of doing tasks to erase hard drive data if you are in the situations mentioned can truly protect you from problematic situations.