So you think that by formatting the hard drive of your computer, you have completely deleted all your crucial files and personal information from it and you now can consider it ready to be sold. If yes, then you are wrong! There are various specialized data recovery tools available by which one can recover your formatted or permanently deleted data and can misuse them for identity theft. At this time, you may think that you should never sell your old PC.
What should you do if you want to sell your old computer without causing criminals to steal your personal information? Use a hammer to smash the hard drive of computer before disposing it?
Well, no, not at all! There is lots of hard drive wiping tools available online which overwrite entire hard drive content and make its content unavailable for villains.
However, an obvious question may strike on your mind; even if formatting the hard disk how these data recovery tools recover permanently deleted data. If this is so, then how using hard disk wiping tools we can restrict cyber criminals access our invaluable data.
The answer of first question resides in the way the hard drive stores data or information. The operating system of your computer maintains an index file on the hard drive. This index file contains list of the locations of each file stored on the hard disk of your computer. Whenever you delete a file from your system, only its entry from the index is removed, however the file with its entire data remains at its location. Same is the case with formatting. Efficient data recovery tools are capable enough to find these files with no index entries and thus recover your data. Though data recovery tools are boon in various cases of hard drive crash but can be disastrous, if your hard drive falls in wrong hands.
Now answer to the second question. These third-party wiping tools are basically data destruction tools which erase your data completely by overwriting it through secure wipe methods. Stellar Disk Wipe is one such tool. Through easy to use wizard of the software, you can wipe off your entire confidential data from the selected hard drive without leaving even single chance of recovery. From the list of standard wiping algorithms, you can select the one and start permanent wiping of your data in one go. Since the software runs from the boot CD so there is no need to install it on your system, the software provides details of the process during wiping, and generates a log report of entire process.
So you can use Stellar Wipe and dispose your PC without any fear of cyber crime or identity theft!!!
