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Unless you're engaged in international espionage, sanitizing a drive by overwriting the data is probably adequate protection but it is theoretically possible for someone with the resources of the National "disintegrate, incinerate, pulverize, shred or melt." Department of Defense's "clearing and sanitizing standard" recommends that defense contractors "overwrite all addressable locations with a character, its complement, then a random character and verify."Īnother option - which most of us will probably never use is to With the exception of top secret documents, the U.S. The most common method involves "overwriting" a file or an entire disk by replacing the old data with new "null" data such as zeros.
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During the Iran Contra scandal, it was revealed Oliver North thought he had destroyed thousands of e-mail messages only to find out they had been archived from the e-mail system's backup tapes.įortunately, there are many programs - including some that are free - that can protect your privacy by "sanitizing" your hard drive. Of course, anything sent via the Internet might also be stored on a server, a remote backup system or someone else's computer.
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Another source of "hidden" personal information includes e-mail programs which sometimes archive your incoming and outgoing messages. These files are created automatically but they are not necessarily deleted automatically. In addition to the files that you know about, your hard disk may contain personal information in "temporary" files such as a browser or print spooler cache. If you visit the File & Disk Management section of, you'll find numerous "free to try" programs designed to recover deleted files or formatted disks. But you don't even have to spend anything to get your hands on such software. The popular Norton System Works ($69) includes Norton UnFormat and Norton UnErase that can often do the trick. Someone looking to gather your personal information from a discarded disk drive doesn't even need any particularly expensive or exotic software. "Recover it All" from DTI Data advertises that it can "Recover data lost due to Format, Fdisk, virus attack, deletion and many other scenarios." There are numerous programs that can bring back seemingly eradicated from formatted hard drives. The same is true with the fdisk command which creates and deletes hard drive partitions.

While it will make the disk appear to be empty, that data itself will not be erased. The Windows Format command will warn you that "Formatting will erase ALL data on this disk," but, again, that's not entirely true. You can even try it out for free.Īt first glance, formatting a hard disk sure seems like a pretty good way to obliterate your data, but it's not.
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There are versions of VirtualLab data recovery software for both Windows and Macintosh. "Undelete" from Executive Software is one of many that will allow you to recover deleted files on Windows. Numerous software products are available that allow you to "undelete" such files. But it's bad news if you want it permanently gone. This can be good news if you've accidentally deleted something. The MS-DOS delete command doesn't have an obvious "undo" feature but it too can easily be reversed. Deleting a file the standard way is a bit like crumpling up a piece of paper and throwing it in the trash can rather than running it through a shredder. Erasing a file doesn't actually delete the data it just removes the file name from the directory. The Mac, for example, asks you if you are sure "you want to remove the item in the trash permanently." Windows asks if you're "sure you want to delete all of the items in the recycling bin."īut neither method is permanent.
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Both the Mac and Windows allow you to go one step further by emptying the trash which appears to delete the file completely.
