Do you remember the leaked pictures and documents from a Maldivian Minister's computer? Are you planning to sell your PC? Even if you formatted your hard disk, your data is still there. Anybody with the right tools can recover your data easily. All your photos, personal documents may appear on social networking sites the next day. Or worse, your financial records, your credit card information and your passwords may be leaked.
Another scenario...you are an activist, secretly working to topple an autocratic government, and one day somebody knocks your door. You find out that they are from the secret service, and you have tons of information on your computer which they can use against you. What do you do?
The easiest and best solution is to remove the hard drive and keep it somewhere safe. What if you need to destroy the data on the hard disk? Well, opportunely big-hearted programmers have developed applications which wipe out the data completely from your storage device.
DBAN — All-At-Once Data Destruction
One program that will do this for you is Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN), which securely wipes out the data completely. Best of all, it is open source and free. DBAN also has an enterprise version which comes with network booting and technical support.
Darik's Boot and Nuke is available for the Macintosh and PC as an ISO file for CD/DVD. Furthermore DBAN provides a utility to make a bootable floppy disk which can also be used to destroy data on a computer.
To securely wipe out any data on your system, all you have to do is boot with the CD/DVD or the floppy disk. DBAN will entirely wipe out any data in all of the hard disks it detects, automatically.
How to make a DBAN CD/DVD:
1. Download DBAN for recent Intel and AMD computers.
2. Burn the ISO file to a blank CD/DVD with CD/DVD burning software such as Nero and CD Burner XP (the default ISO burning options should work). If you can’t determine how to burn an ISO file then refer to the CD/DVD burner software’s manual.
Article comments
1 - Mark Buckingham
For those not in the know, formatting your hard drive generally only deletes the file tables and/or the master boot record. In layman's terms, it erases the table of contents on the drive, opening it all up to be rewritten, but doesn't actually delete the existing data on the drive. It will overwrite it when instructed to do so as you refill the drive, but that data stays in place and can be read by forensic data recovery tools until then.
What serious drive wiping programs do is go back over every sector of the drive and wipe it back to zero (or some other combination of zeros and ones you specify, depending on the program used). Secure Erasers like DBAN mentioned in this article, DOD Wipe, and others do this sort of thing, and can be at the level of wipe security used by the government.
If you're a total technophobe and don't want to be bothered configuring software to wipe a drive, you can opt to shred the drive physically, making it extremely difficult to rebuild the data off the platters inside. Special equipment or some drop-off services are usually required to complete this sort of task.