Another way is to completely wipe the drive or partition clean so no data at all is left on it and nothing at all can be recovered. One way is to wipe the free space on the drive meaning only those files currently visible can be viewed.
What you can do is make sure that before a hard drive, SSD or USB stick goes to somebody else, temporarily or permanently, any data that you don’t ever want to be read by others or recovered from these devices gets wiped clean and cannot be retrieved. The same thing applies to external storage media like USB sticks or memory cards, and these are perhaps more important as they are far more likely to change hands than internal devices.
This fact is especially important if you are giving away or selling an old computer system / hard drive, or just letting someone borrow an external hard drive or even USB stick because the other user could easily recover data you thought was gone, posing a major security risk.Įven a format and reinstall of the operating system in that situation still doesn’t mean all the old data is completely safe from being recovered by others. A lot of computer users will know that when you delete a file, it isn’t actually completely gone from the system and can often be recovered with a simple piece of data recovery software.
