Data are very important in today’s digital era. It plays an important role in our life and work. When you don't need some data anymore, you have to dispose it correctly in order to avoid privacy leakage. Thus, safe disposal of data is in urgent need.
Data are used to store information for us. Some data are just for fun, while others may be extremely important for us, or even for the survival of the enterprise. Losing some music or pictures you downloaded from the internet is not a big deal; yet, if your private data or company’s confidential data get lost or leaked, it will cause incalculable loss.
That’s why the safe disposal of data draws so many people’s attention. When a private/confidential file is not needed anymore, you have to dispose it securely, instead of deleting them like other normal data. You know, even the permanently deleted data can be recovered with tools.
Safe Disposal of Data Is Necessary
If the performance of an old device is so bad that you can’t stand it anymore, you must dispose it properly. You don’t want to be suffering from data leakage, right? Actually, special care is needed when you plan to discard the following old devices:
- Desktop and laptop
- Mobile Phones
- Servers
- Tablets
- Hard drives
- SSDs
- USB drives
- SD cards
- …
Definitely, before you discard an old storage device and send it to electronics recycling centers, you need to erase data on it completely to eliminate unauthorized disclosure of information. Some people may think that the permanently deleted data and the data lost due to a disk drive crash or broken device are irretrievable. Yet, it is often not the case.
To prevent leakage, you may need to turn to data destruction. This service is included in some outfits that dealing with electronics for disassembly and resale or material. But the safest way is to depend on yourself – destroy data in person.
Destroy Data on Storage Devices
As a matter of fact, the data stored in your storage devices (such as computer hard drive and USB flash drive) will reside in its storage media after deletion or formatting. Considering this, in this part, I will discuss 3 things that you need to do before disposing old storage device.
Click here if you’d like to know how to recover data from a formatted drive.
3 Ways to Destroy Data before Sending Storage Device Away
One: encryption.
Encryption is the process of encoding a message or information in such a way that only authorized parties can access it and those who are not authorized cannot.– According to Wikipedia
After encrypting your data, you’ll make it impossible for others to retrieve the content unless they can get access to the encryption key. You can choose to encrypt the entire storage device or only some of the files located here.
However, you can find a lot of encryption software on the internet, this gives other people chance to retrieve your data.
Two: secure data erasure
The secure data erasure is a software-based method for overwriting every bits of the memory space of your storage device. In this way, all the original data will be overwritten and kept in unrecoverable state.
Click to see how to erase the whole disk or erase only a partition.
Three: physical drive destruction
This seems to be the simplest way. You can break the device into pieces (industrial standard tools are required), burn it or use other special ways to complete data destruction.
After you have done these and confirmed that all your private data or business files are cleared completely, you may dispose the electronic waste responsibly in an environmentally friendly way.
User Comments :