The IT Nerd

Here’s a nasty little secret: When you erase your hard drive (or many other types of storage media), your files are still there for anyone to find. That can come back to haunt you in terms of fraud and ID Theft. The more paranoid among us will say that you should destroy the hard drive, and while that will work it is a bit extreme. I prefer to secure erase the drive myself. The application that I recommend for this task is Darik’s Boot And Nuke. It is a downloadable CD image that you burn to a CD-R and then use it to boot and nuke your computer in an absolutely secure manner so that nobody can get your data back. One thing to keep in mind is that it can take three to five hours to complete this task, your mileage may vary. But that’s the only way to securely erase a hard disk.

I highly recommend this if you are selling a computer and you want to make sure that your stuff is gone. Just make sure to make a backup first.

This entry was posted on February 3, 2009 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Security, Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.