Happy Earth Day!

In the spirit of Earth Day I was thinking about ways that you can recycle your old computer. One thing that comes to mind would be to destroy all of the personal information that exists on your device before you give it away or send it to an e-waste recycling center. How do you erase your data? Well there's more than one way to skin a cat. First you must locate the hard drive on your machine. Once you locate the hard drive, remove it from your computer. You then can do several things. One would be to put some heavy duty magnets all over it. This is likely to erase most of it but there's no guarantee. Another method would be to strike it with a hammer or similar item so the drive is no longer physically recognizable. This is a fun way to get your frustrations out and is reminiscent of the movie Office Space. However a very clever computer scientist still may be able to recover some data. The method that I like to use is via a program called Advanced System Care. This program has methods of erasing data whereby it writes random data on top of the existing data so as though it cannot be recovered. The data can be over written 7-10 times using a method that the Department of Defense uses as per regulation DoD 5220.22-M(ECE). Or you could go even further nutty with it and leverage the Gutmann Method which is the most secure known to man but is very slow. I prefer using software in this way to delete the files so you can still use the hard drive for other purposes. Smashing it with a hammer will surely make it almost impossible to recover data but it almost guarantees that the drive will be inoperable forever. If you wish to further ensure that no data is retrievable you could use all of the methods described above and then feel very secure in the knowledge that your information is deleted for sure.