Many users do not completely erase data when selling used drives

When selling their old computer or its drive, users usually erase all data from it. In any case, they think they are erasing. But actually it is not. This conclusion was reached by researchers from Blancco, a data deletion and mobile device protection company, and Ontrack, a company that recovers lost data.

For the study, 159 different drives were randomly purchased on eBay. These were both hard drives and solid state drives. After applying data recovery tools and tools to them, it was found that 42% of the drives had at least some data to be recovered. Moreover, about 3 out of 20 discs (about 15%) contained personal information, including images of passports and birth certificates, as well as financial records.

Some disks also contained corporate data. One of the drives I bought had 5 GB of archived internal emails from a major travel company, and the other had 3 GB of shipping information and other data from a trucking company. And yet another drive did contain the data of a software developer, who is described as a developer with "a high level of access to government information."

But how could this happen? The thing is that many users either delete files manually or format the disk, believing that in this way the information disappears for good. But “formatting is not the same as deleting data,” says Fredrik Forslund, vice president of Blancco. He also adds that there are two formatting methods in Windows - quick and less secure, and deeper. But even with a deep format, he says, there is still some data left that can be discovered with the appropriate recovery tools. Yes, and manual deletion does not guarantee the complete erasure of data from the drive.

"It's like reading a book and deleting the table of contents, or removing a pointer to a file in the file system," says Forslund. “But all the data in this file remains on the hard drive, so anyone can download the free recovery software, run it, and get all the data back.”

Therefore, in order to completely delete information and make it impossible to restore it, Forslund suggests using the free DBAN utility. This is open source software, which is exactly supported by Blancco. You can also use CCleaner, Parted Magic, Active Kill Disk and Disk Wipe to completely delete data.

Source: 3dnews.ru