Certified Data Erasure: How Does It Work?
When you’ve had a computer for a few years, it’s natural that it would have several pieces of personal data stored in its hard drive. While you use that computer, this storage provides convenient access to your files.
The question is, what happens when you get rid of that computer? If you have private data stored in your hard drive, people could access that information. This access threatens your privacy.
This possibility is why data erasure is so vital. Data erasure software wipes that data from the hard drive in a way that makes it difficult to retrieve. In this article, we’ll explain how it works so you can protect your privacy!
Why Deleting Files Isn’t Enough
Many people think that deleting files can erase the data in those files from the computer. In reality, this isn’t how deleting works at all.
When you delete data from your computer, all it does is remove the file linkage from your file system’s memory locations. However, deleted files remain on your disk, whether it’s an HDD, SSD, or other external storage media.
For this reason, deleting can actually be a danger to your safety. If you delete something and believe it’s truly gone, you won’t think twice about selling your PC or donating it. Yet, when another person receives the hard drive, they could retrieve your data and cause you several problems.
How Data Erasure Fixes the Problem
Data erasure goes far beyond deleting files by making it incredibly difficult to retrieve ghost data. There are several different ways this works. We’ll examine these approaches and their pros and cons below.
Degaussing
Degaussing is a process that erases data by attacking and neutralizing the magnetic field of electromechanical storage media. These media include things like hard disk drives.
By neutralizing these magnetic fields, the process destroys your data beyond recovery. This ability has made degaussing the gold standard for data destruction on traditional hard disks.
However, this approach won’t work on solid-state drives (SSDs). The reason for this is that SSDs don’t store data magnetically.
Instead, they use flash memory chips to store data. These chips do not require magnetic coating.
Since they don’t have a magnetic field, degaussing cannot affect SSDs. If your hard drive uses this material, you’ll need another approach to erase data.
Data Erasure Software
The other approach that often proves more universally effective is data erasure software. This software overwrites the data on a hard drive to the point of irretrievability.
Most software designed for this purpose does two things. First, they allow for selecting a specific standard based on specific needs.
From there, it verifies the overwriting procedure proved successful and removing the data from the hard drive. An example of this is Certus Software.
Find Your Data Erasure Software
If you plan on getting rid of a computer, data erasure is an essential service. So, find a way to erase data that secures your privacy today!
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