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How is the data erased from a hard disk?

In: Hard Disk Drives [Edit categories]

Answer:

You often need an actual product designed to delete your data. I was giving an old computer to a friend, and I was worried about the data that I thought he might be able to retrieve later. So, I used StompSoft's DriveWasher (http://www.stompsoft.com/drivewasher.html) at the suggestion of a friend. It gave me peace of mind, and I felt I didn't have to worry about my data being viewed or retrieved. There are many products on the market, but I would recommend staying away from the freeware ones.

When deleting information on a computer, the information itself is not erased straight away. The pointer to that particular information is erased so that the system no longer knows how to find it. The information remains on the media until the system writes new information over it; since there is no pointer to the information, the system believes that area of media to be blank and can write to the area. Because of this it is likely that any information "deleted" will remain on the media for a length of time dependant on the size of the media, the size of information being written to it and frequency of information being written. As mentioned above, if the information needs to be erased immediately use a specificly designed program for this purpose.

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First answer by Javaperl. Last edit by TweekNZ. Contributor trust: 2 [recommend contributor ]. Question popularity: 64 [recommend question].

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