How to Completely Wipe Your Hard Drive

 

How to Completely Wipe Your Hard Drive

Knowing how to safely wipe your hard drive, SSD, or phone is an important part of managing your data in these modern times. If you want to free up some space in your family photos folder or simply make sure that a sensitive file of your work is dead and 100% buried, it is vital to learn the ins and outs of safely erasing the storage drives from your fixed computer, laptop, tablet or Smartphone.

So keep reading this comprehensive guide from Comparitech about everything you need to know about how to perform Data Wipe safely and reliably.

Why is it not enough to "delete" your data?

Both a Mac, a PC or a phone include their own tools for erasing files. What's the problem with just deleting them and forgetting about it? To begin with, although we believe that the Mac, the PC and the phone delete a file after pressing the corresponding button, the truth is that these files are often transferred to folders buried in the recesses of your storage unit, where it continues to occupy space together to other files that you have also deleted.

There are several reasons why operating systems do that. The first is probably the most obvious: when someone deletes something, they don't always mean to actually delete it. That is why items such as the Windows recycle bin or the "recently deleted" folders on the iPhone are useful. They allow you to recover files deleted by mistake before they are completely removed from your computer.

Knowing this, that “pause” is always useful before permanently deleting a photo or file. Having the option to undo it can be the difference between losing and not losing an album full of photos from your child's first trip to Disneyland. Folders like that are the best ways to prevent yourself from becoming your own worst enemy. But what about those files that you do choose to permanently delete, like when you empty the Windows Recycle Bin?

You may be surprised to learn that those files are not deleted the way you think either. Data recovery programs like Windows Data Recovery Professional, from Stellar Phoenix, are specifically created to sift through what is left in sectors of old hard drives (formatted or not) and gather the remains of wiped data to compose a complete image of what was deleted on that hard drive. Therefore, emptying your recycle bin is undoubtedly a step in the right direction, but it is not by far the ideal solution if you want a true erasure with all the guarantees.

To prevent someone from being able to find the slightest trace of a file on your computer, the best option is to use a third-party program designed to completely remove a hard drive or folder from top to bottom.

What if I format it?

“But I have formatted my computer to wipe the hard drive. That should be enough, right? Well, not quite. While it is clear that formatting a hard drive is one of the easiest and most common methods of quickly deleting a lot of data, there are two different types of formatting, and neither is the best solution for thoroughly and completely rewriting the structure of the disc itself.

For starters, a quick format does not delete all the data on the disk and can be considered more of a technique similar to that of the "recently deleted" folder that we discussed earlier. Technically speaking, Quick Format wipes all files that it has been applied to, but a second scan is not done to check if the sectors have been removed well, as it does with a full format. Thus, even a basic data recovery program would be able to restore the remnants of the quick format.

When doing a full or standard format in Windows (from Vista versions onwards), the PC executes a single pass of what is called the write-zero method throughout the entire disk . What it does is convert all the binary data on the drive to “0”, replacing the usual combination of zeros and ones or other information that may be stored in your folders and files. A single pass or rewrite with zeros is efficient up to a point, but there are many data recovery programs designed to succeed in gathering data from sectors that either were not wiped completely or were not verified after the first rewrite.

How Secure Data Wipe Programs Work

If you do a search for Data Wipe programs, you will see that there are hundreds of options available, many of them free. It can be difficult to know which ones are best suited for your hardware and which ones offer the best balance between features and security.

Secure Wipe programs can employ a number of methods to remove the information stored on your disk, including: zero rewrites, secure wipe rewrites, file destruction, and data encryption.

Each has its advantages and disadvantages in terms of how it deletes files, how secure the method used is, or the types of drives and file systems it manages to handle. Choosing the most suitable program for you essentially depends on how far you want to go with the erasure and how many drives you intend to clean at once.

Among the various methods available, the most common are zero rewrites and secure wipe. IT professionals sometimes prefer Secure Data Wipe because that task is performed by the drive itself, while Zero Rewriting often requires an extra check after the process is complete.

In Secure Wipe, the disk can use its own write failure detection system to verify that all sectors are actually wiped during the wipe process. And also without having to use extra resources for that task.

The main drawback of the secure wipe method is that it is only useful if you want to reset the entire disk, including file systems and partitions. It does not allow you to individually choose which files or folders to delete. Therefore, if that is your intention, perhaps in your specific case a program that uses the rewriting technique with zeroes will be more convenient for you.