Thursday, May 17, 2012

Correct Hard Drive Disposal Against Identity Theft

By Cheri Knowles


A hard disk is an integral part of a computer. It is used for storing and retrieving data. When a person upgrades his or her computer system, or buys a new one, the old one is usually thrown away. This is considered an unsafe act, especially if proper hard drive disposal was not practiced.

Proper discarding must be done everytime. More often than not, these things contain sensitive or confidential information that shouldn't land on the wrong hands. Credit card details, Social Security Numbers, and the like can pose a serious threat to someone's identity.

These days, one can seek professional help from companies that can physically destroy it. Most companies shred it to ensure that it can no longer be used by anyone else. If the owner doesn't have any plans of keeping or selling it, he or she might as well opt to have it destroyed.

If a person chooses to keep this intact, they can choose to wipe it clean of their files. This can be done by deleting the files and making sure that the recycle bin has been emptied as well. Deleting files only free up space, it does not remove the file from the storage itself.

The whole-drive disposal is another choice on the list. It is like formatting without actually deleting the files. What it does is it overwrites the current data with a series of binary codes a lot of times. This buries the file, and makes it extremely difficult to recover, if not impossible.

There are storage that contain very sensitive information. Some even have a database of their customer's credit card details. If an owner has this type of storage, the best hard drive disposal method is to have it physically torn out. This way, nobody else would be able to access these confidential information. This can be done manually with the use of power tools, or they can seek a professional's help.




About the Author:



0 comments:

Post a Comment