Conclusion On Delete hard drive - It is important to delete all the information and your private data thoroughly from your hard drive before donating it. There are many simple and difficult ways to clear all the information from the hard drive prior to giving it.
I have two hard drives and I am using both of them regularly for my routine work. Recently one of my friend asked me for a hard drive and I don’t have any problem if I will left with only one hard drive to work on. I am not confused to give my drive to my friend too but I want to delete all my data completely from my hard drive in the way it would remain unrecoverable. How can I delete data from my hard drive in a confidential way? Is it possible for me to delete the data in the way that it would not be recovered anyhow?
Exactly a hard drive must be washed away from all the informations contained by it before you donates it. It is necessary to protect your personal data from revealing as well as your valuable information might not be leaked to anyone. Here are some general ideas to delete the data from your hard drive but they have also their limitations at some extent:-
- The most conventional one is to format the drive. It is reliable too but try to avoid the selection of ‘quick format’ offered by windows. Quick format sometimes leaves some key behind for the possibility to recover the data by any efficient tool still after the drive has been formatted. This happens because in quick format most of the part of the drive is not accesed for format during the process.
- Always select unconditional format when you are subjecting your drive to format. This kind of format can still provide you more security regarding the recovery of your data. But it still leaves an opportunity to recover the formatted data not easily but some specific and valuable tools.
- A very interesting and easy way to make your important data unrecoverable is to copy a very common file, might be any mp3 file everywhere in your drive without leaving any empty space in it.This will secure your important data from recovery because a non-useful file has been overwritten everywhere in the drive.
Some people suggested me to use a big strong magnet to erase your drive completely but I recommend that it does not effect your drive significantly at all.
If you are not intentional to donate or gift your drive infact you need to discard your drive due to any reason, but worried for the recovery of your confidential data from anyone, you can destroy your drive physically. This might include drilling the drive or stacking the chips by opening it or something similar like this. I like to take this step in case of discarding a dead drive.
