Gone are the days when office memos and important material used to be given out to the employees in pen and paper form; important communication data is now circulated amongst the employees via electronic mail or PowerPoint presentations. It is no wonder then that our dependency on electronic data has increased significantly in the past decade.
Destroying Confidential Data
While data preservation is an important aim for almost every individual and company, data destruction can be as important sometimes. Almost all our transactions and communications take place electronically, which makes our confidential data vulnerable to malicious people. Therefore, it is imperative for the users to maintain the confidentiality of this data even when this data is destroyed.
Most people delete the confidential data and think that it has been destroyed permanently. However, nothing could be further from truth. Deleting your data or even emptying the recycle bin does not assure destruction of data. When the users delete these files, these files do not actually get deleted but simply add up to the free data space on the hard disk. Till the time a user overwrites onto this free space, the deleted data will remain undamaged. In addition, overwriting of this free space will only occur when the hard disk does not have any more unused space on it.
Deleted Data and DIY Data Recovery Software
If you think that overwriting on the freed data space due to deletion will ensure data destruction, it may not be entirely true. While people are spending millions on preserving their valuable data, the data recovery market is also coming up with ways to address data loss situations as and when they happen. Therefore, while data recovery software may appear to be god-sent when you actually want to recover your data, it can spell disaster if it recovers your deleted confidential data.
It is very easy for DIY data recovery software to recover deleted and even overwritten data. Therefore, if your aim is to destroy confidential data, you will have to do a little more than plain deletion. Some people think that reformatting the hard disk will delete the data forever. However, when a user reformats the hard disk, the data merely gets hidden from the user. Therefore, the user is tricked into believing that the files have been deleted whereas the files are merely hidden from the operating system.
Reformatting the data was considered the easiest way to destroy the data. However, with tools such as Disk Investigator and Norton System Works, recovering data has become a very easy task. Even partitioning the hard disk does not permanently delete the files. During the partitioning process, the data gets reorganised and, therefore, it looks as if the hard disk has free space. However, the data does not actually get deleted and can be easily accessed using DIY data recovery software.
How to Ensure That Data Becomes Unrecoverable When Discarding the Data Storage Devices?
Overwriting new data on the old data has the ability to destroy the old data. However, with the advent of superior data recovery tools, even this procedure may not be able to destroy your data permanently unless you overwrite on your existing data multiple times.
Overwriting multiple times renders even the most efficient data recovery tool ineffective because the tool will not be able to read the magnetic traces of the old confidential data. According to data recovery experts, you will need to overwrite on the existing data several times to ensure that the data destruction is successful.
Now, if your aim is to destroy your confidential data, you must be wondering the ideal number of times you would need to overwrite on your old data in order to successfully destroy this data. Experts agree that overwriting on the existing data approximately 7 to 11 times should do the trick.
If you are wondering about the time you would be wasting in accomplishing this feat, you need not worry. You do not have to manually overwrite the data so many times to destroy your data. There are special software applications available in the market that can help you achieve this goal.
The software applications write patterns of meaningless data on the various sectors of the hard disk. When these patterns are written multiple times, it effectively results in permanent data loss. Some users have also tried to physically destroy the hard disk to achieve victorious results. However, for this procedure to be successful, you will have to destroy the hard disk completely. Pouring acid on the hard disk or punching a hole in the hard disk may give successful results.
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