Safest Way to Wipe Out Your PC Hard Drive
- 1). Back-up the entire hard drive.To do this, Craig Sims of Cnet's Australian branch recommends DriveImage, free software from Runtime.org.
Alternately, you can manually back up the files you want to save by searching through your computer, and copy and pasting them to another drive, CD or DVD. - 2). Use freeware software such as SureDelete from Wizard Industries or Eraser to overwrite the data on your drive (See Resources).
- 3). Overwrite your drive up to seven times to ensure that all of your personal data has been securely scrambled. Once is likely enough for personal PCs. For work computers or those storing extremely important or sensitive data more overwrites may be warranted.
- 4). Format the drive if you plan on keeping it. Overwriting it fills the drive with corrupted garbage data.
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