Wiping Your Hard Drive Clean

After a week long hiatus from the blog, I'm back and ready to impart some very useful information to you.  This week Guy and I are here to help you wipe your hard drive clean.  No, we're not talking about erasing those sites you've been trying to hide from your wife/girlfriend.  You can just clear your history for that.  We're talking about getting rid of stored credit card information, social security numbers, and passwords.

Now before you go crazy and start erasing everything on your hard drive, let's start by going over when you should be erasing your hard drive.  The only real reason you really want to do this is when you're getting rid of an old computer or replacing a hard drive you're planning on passing on to someone else.  Point of fact, even when you delete files on your computer, they're still there until something else occupies that space in memory.  This means that when you get rid of your hard drive, someone can recover the information in it even if the files are deleted.

There are two basic ways of making sure that information isn't there.  The first is loading it up with a bunch of zeros.  This erases the information and once the zeros have replaced everything, there is no way of recovering it.  The other way is loading it up with garbage.  There really isn't any advantage to doing one over the other as far as I know.  Once you've done one of these, all of that top secret information you've been trying to destroy is once again safe.

Now, how do you go about doing this?  It actually depends on what kind of media (hard disk, flash drive, etc.) you're trying to wipe clean.  Gizmodo has a great list of ways to completely erase your hard drive, and we recommend you check it out for learning exactly what you need to do in more vivid detail.  Another way you can do it, which I learned in college, is to run it through a really strong magnet.  How strong?  Well, trust me, one stronger than any you might have laying around the house, so just check out the Gizmodo page for more reasonable methods.

That's all for this week.  Guy insists that I admit that I really decided to write this because I like pretending I'm a super hero on weekends and I erase my hard drive to clear my top secret research files which don't actually exist.  Consider this my admission of guilt.  For more admissions of guilt you can follow me on Twitter @YasarSavings.