How to Wipe Your Hard Drive to Permanently Remove Private Or Sensitive Data

You may not know how to wipe your hard drive, but you should be aware of the process. Computer security is a major concern for both business people and individuals, these days. If you want to keep your data safe, you should consider clearing all of the files off of your computer using a wipe disk tool, when necessary.

What is a wipe disk tool? Well, it's a tool designed to completely delete all files on a hard disk drive. It even detects and deletes files that could potentially be used to restore regularly deleted data. There is no better way of cleaning files from your computer permanently than using a wipe disk tool.

What possible reason could you have for wanting to wipe your hard drive completely clean? Well, if you personally or your business decides to get new computers, you may want to wipe the data from the old units. That will guard against it falling into the wrong hands.

Another scenario where it could be useful is if your company is going out of business and you are selling your computers. This is especially important for business owners who have client confidentiality to consider. There's no telling who will wind up in possession of the computers, after all.

Simply using the delete key or dragging files to your recycle bin is not going to remove those files from your computer completely. You are probably only deleting short cuts, if you delete things that way. It can take hours and be totally useless for your data security.

If you don't learn how to permanently wipe your hard drive, anyone can access files on it. All they need to do is use some sort of system recovery software to access the files. System recovery software can be found all over the Internet.

You might also try clearing files from your computer by simply formatting the hard drive, but that doesn't actually protect your files. A skilled specialist in data recovery can still retrieve them. So, using a wipe disk tool is a much better and safer idea.

Disk wiping is one of the most secure ways of wiping your hard drive. It is a very thorough process, too. It can even delete licensed programs. How does it work? Well, a disk wiping tool is designed to overwrite your whole hard drive multiple times with data. That way, it's impossible for anyone, no matter how skilled, to recover files that were created before the disk wiping process was done. Not only that, but such programs are so thorough that they also usually wipe out the master boot record and partitioned drives, too.

The government has set a medium security standard that says that a hard drive should be overwritten six times, over the course of three different steps. The first step is to remove the hard drive data. The second is to replace it with a series of zeros. The third assigns a code, 246, to the wiped drive. It takes a while, but it's very important to wipe your hard drive, if you don't want people to access your files.