There are times when you need to dispose of old laptop and upgrade to a new one. In that case, you may choose to donate the old computer or dump it with a reseller or recycler. You might also decide to upgrade the old computer and exchange it for a high-end laptop in the market.
In all these situations, the computer leaves your ownership and goes into the possession of a third party (individual or organization) with complete control over the device and your personal data stored on it. The computer’s new owner can use publicly available software or lab recovery techniques to retrieve your data and misuse it if they want.
Notably, even if you had deleted the data, emptied the Recycle Bin, or formatted the hard drive before disposing of the computer, the data remains inside the computer’s storage drive in a recoverable state.
Therefore, you must dispose of the data before parting ways with your old laptop, irrespective of whether you’re selling or recycling it. And you can dispose of the data using the data erasure technique. Of course, you need to back up all data before erasing it from the old device as it will be removed forever without any scope for recovery.
Disposing of an Old Computer: Types of Data at Risk
Disposing of an old computer without prior data erasure can leak the following types of sensitive personal information:
- Private messages, photos, and videos
- Birth records and social security numbers
- Income tax records and banking details
- Personal health records
- Social media credentials
The biggest hazard of unsafe data disposal is that you may not even know about data leak or compromise until much later when the damage is already done. We’ll discuss the major implications of personal data theft in the following section.
Risks of Disposing of an Old Computer Without Erasing Data?
Data theft or leaks when disposing of an old computer without data erasure can incur various kinds of risks, such as identity theft, credit records manipulation, financial frauds, mental harassment, etc.
Identity Theft & Financial Frauds: An imposter can assume your identity by taking illegal possession of your confidential personal information and exploit it to perform fraudulent banking and credit card transactions, credit history manipulation, debt accrual, etc., causing tremendous financial harm. As per Consumer Sentinel Network Book published by the Federal Trade Commission in 2021, nearly 400,000 credit card frauds and 242,000 loan or lease frauds were reported in 2020 in the US due to identity theft.
False Incrimination & Legal Risks: Aside from financial risks and denial of services, personal data theft and its manipulation can hold you responsible for misdeeds carried out in your name. The situation may compel you to face criminal charges and trudge through a legal course to settle down the disputes. Such false incrimination can extend beyond fake financial transactions to nefarious social engineering schemes at your expense, with grave legal implications.
Online Defamation & Credibility Loss: Data theft can make you a victim of defamation, embarrassment, and public scrutiny at a minimum. These are reasons enough for mental torment aside from the loss of credibility and implications like social ostracism. Imagine a nightmarish situation, where someone’s private information like photos or videos are extracted from a disposed of computer and posted on a social media website.
The 3 Things You Must Do Before Selling or Exchanging Your Laptop
Selling or exchanging your used laptop is not a straightforward transaction as the system might contain a lot of your private data. So, before giving away your laptop, you need to ensure the following:
- Retain the important data you had stored on the laptop by backing it up
- Wipe the data from your laptop so that nobody is able to gain access to it
- Ensure your laptop fetches the best resale value by properly maintaining it
Back Up Your data
Before parting with your computer, it’s essential to safeguard your important files by creating a backup that you can easily restore to your new device. Since a factory reset will wipe everything, including any backups stored locally, it’s best not to rely on a backup on your main drive.
If your protective copy resides on the same drive where Windows is installed, take the extra step to move it to a cloud service or an external drive to ensure you don’t lose your data. Here’s how to backup files to an external storage drive:
Step 1: Right-click on the Windows Start icon and click Settings.
Step 2: Click on Update & Security.
Step 3: Click Backup on the left sidebar.
Step 4: Click on Add a drive.
Step 5: Choose the external drive where you want to store your backup.
Step 6: Follow the on-screen instructions to complete the backup process.
The duration of this process will depend on how much data is stored on your hard drive, so it might take some time. Don’t worry if you don’t see a progress bar, it’s quite common not to have one appear during the operation.
Wipe the Data from Your Laptop
As mentioned earlier, your laptop might contain sensitive information, such as personal photos, videos, identity documents, financial documents, etc. So, permanently erase the contents of your laptop before you decide to sell or exchange the system.
Many people opt for formatting the drive, believing that formatting permanently removes the data from the hard drive. The fact is that formatting is a method to prepare a storage media for fresh use; it does not remove the contents. Anyone can use a data recovery software or method and potentially recover the formatted data from the laptop.
So, you must be wondering how to permanently delete the data from your laptop, so that no one can recover it?
Use a File Erasure software to wipe your data beyond the scope of recovery and ensure total peace of mind. Here’s why.
A file erasure software overwrites the existing data once or multiple times, with binary patterns like 0s 1s, and random characters, using advanced data erasure standards, ensuring that no data recovery tool or method can recover the wiped data.
Stellar File Eraser is a reliable DIY file erasure tool that permanently erases any type of files or folders from laptop, desktop, USB hard drive, etc. It wipes the unused space on your laptop, ensuring that your previously deleted files are also erased, beyond the threats of extraction or theft. The tool lets you sell or exchange your laptop with total peace of mind.
Keep your Laptop in a presentable & Fully Functional state
Now that you have backed-up all the important data on secondary storage like a hard drive or cloud and wiped your laptop, the next step is to ensure that your laptop looks spick-and-span from the outside. This step involves gently cleaning the laptop to remove the dirt or grime and replacing any missing or faulty components, such as the keys, USB port, battery, adapter, etc.
Before you start the cleaning procedure, ensure that your laptop is powered off. Also, you should only use the prescribed methods and materials to clean the laptop. Having a fully functional device in a presentable condition can fetch you more bucks than you expect.
Conclusion
In this blog, we discussed the step-by-step guidelines you need to follow before selling or exchanging your laptop. These steps are essential to safeguard the privacy of your data and also ensure that you always have access to it via backups.
For secure data removal with minimal hassle, use Stellar File Eraser. A tool designed to permanently erase the data stored on your laptop or external hard drive. It is a must-have utility to ensure the permanent removal of data and protect you against data theft and misuse when you sell a used laptop or other devices.
