What Happens to Data on Old Computers?

There was a programme recently on television (Real Story: BBC One, Monday, 14 August) which highlighted a real security problem with old computers. That problem is that the hard disk can contain highly confidential information which can be easily retrieved by an unscrupulous person at a later date. There is an article on the BBC website which goes into quite a lot of detail.

If you take an old computer to one of the recycling centres in Essex it finds its way to Nigeria where for a very small amount of money the hard disk can be purchased. Data is easily retrieved even from deleted files. To make matters worse many faulty hard disks can be coaxed into life and the data extracted.

What can one do to protect oneself? The simplest thing to do before disposing of an old computer is to take out the hard disk and use it as a backup in your new computer. This is not always possible as technology changes and SATA disks replace PATA disks.

If you want to give a working computer to someone the best thing to do is to reinstall the operating system and perform a full format as part of that process. Any confidential data is beyond the resources of almost everyone after a full disk format.

If you want to be really sure that your data is gone for good there is a free utility called DBAN http://dban.sourceforge.net/ which will automatically and completely delete the contents of any hard disk that it can detect. If you can burn an ISO image to a CD and set the boot order of your computer to boot from CD first, then this is probably the solution for you.

DBAN is known to have problems with some RAID systems and like most freeware programs does not come with any guarantees at all. That does not mean that it is not a very good and effective utility. I recently wiped a 40GB disk for a client which took about 2½ hours on a 2GHz machine. So it's not quick, but then it can't be because of all the data that has to be written to the disk.

A broken hard drive should be made safe with a couple of wallops from a hammer or being dropped from an upstairs window onto a hard surface. If the physical media is damaged it will put of all but the most determined like Law Enforcement agencies.

If you have stuff that is really, really sensitive you probably need one of the offerings from Blancco Ltd this is the only Government certified disk erasure software that I could find. There are various versions ranging in price from around £11 to around £56 for different system types.

As a service to readers in the UK I will provide a CD with DBAN for £5 including postage. Send a message from the contact page and I will reply with instructions.

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