How to Perform Safe Data Wiping on Personal Information in Computers

 

How to Perform Safe Data Wiping on Personal Information in Computers

Secure erase of disks or disk drives refers to the steps required to make the information on them inaccessible and unreadable.

When we send a file to the trash and empty it, we forget about that file and move on to something else. But it turns out, with the right recovery tool; it is possible to get that file back.

This is not a problem unless we are talking about delicate documents and, especially, if we get rid of or lose an external disk, a USB memory or an SD card.

 

Formatting a disk with the default method implies to any device or operating system that that storage unit is available to fill with our files and folders. However, the old content is still there until it is overwritten by another file. To simplify: any storage unit is written with bits. Although those bits no longer indicate that they are a file or folder visible by your operating system, until they are rewritten these bits will continue to be recoverable.

 

This is so in any storage technology, such as hard drives or HDD or solid state drives or SSD, whether internal or external drives, memory cards for the camera, stickers or USB sticks.

And this is where the concept of secure erase comes in.

Secure erase. What does it consist of?

Secure erase basically consists of formatting a storage device by overwriting the information with empty data, so that the previous information is unrecognizable. The process takes longer than a standard format, but the result is to ensure that previous information cannot be recovered. As indicated by the official Microsoft help, the Windows fast format creates a new table of files, so that we do not have direct access to the previous content without a specific tool. But the data is still there.

 

There is the standard, more efficient formatting, but it also does not guarantee that all data will be overwritten, so previous data is also recoverable. In Windows, to perform a secure erase we will need third-party tools.

 

Secure erase in Windows

Despite the many new features and improvements in Windows, its umpteenth version still does not have a disk management system that guarantees the safe erasure of its content.

As in previous versions, Windows 10 offers fast and normal format, but no additional systems such as 7-step or 35-step.

Active @ KillDisk allows us to format and delete data on external or secondary drives from Windows. For this, it offers support for different file systems (including HFS + and exFAT), and up to 25 security standards to choose the one that best suits the time we have or the security we seek. HDShredder is a tool to safely format disks and perform Data Wipe partitions. Available in several versions, one of which is free, it is compatible with internal and external drives, USB drives, etc.

 

Hardwipe is used to format disks from Windows or from an external USB pendrive. It is free for personal use and has security standards such as GOST R 50739-95, DOD 5220.22-M, Schneier and Gutmann.

 

Secure Data Wipe in macOS

If you need to safely delete data from a pendrive or external hard drive, macOS has the necessary options thanks to its Disk Utility. From Disk Utility we can manage, format and partition any disk drive, internal or external. Regarding secure deletion, by clicking on the drive to be formatted, click on Delete> Security options ... and we will have four different deletion methods, from faster to more secure.

 

The first corresponds to the usual quick format method, which simply rewrites the file table. The second rewrites the table and overwrites the data twice. The third method performs three successive erasures, overwriting the disk twice with random data.

 

Finally, the most secure method offered by macOS for Data Wiping and overwrites the disk 7 times , as specified by the United States Department of Defense DoD 5220-22 M. There are more secure systems, such as the Gutmann Method, which rewrites data on disk up to 35 times. However, with the previous method of rewriting the disk 7 times we can already be quite sure.