You know the drill. You’ve decided to clean up your hard drive to free some space and in the process deleted some files that had some personal information in them. Maybe you had a text file that listed all your passwords and PIN numbers; or you had sensitive banking information in them. Whatever the case, you dragged the files or folders to the recycle bin and then forgot about it. Now you think that your information is deleted forever and will never be seen by anyone else ever again. WRONG ANSWER! In reality all you have done is erase a entry in the computer’s memory that points to the actual file location. You have not erased a single thing.
What? Your files and personal data are still on your computer’s hard drive? Absolutely! You, or anyone else for that matter, can download absolutely free software to recover those files. Let’s take a brief examination of the file-writing and erasing procedures for your computer to better help you understand just exactly what is going on.
When you write something on your hard drive you are writing in a series of 1’s and 0’s. This is called binary language. If you were to examine the hard drive under a microscope you won’t actually see these 1’s and 0’s but would see very tiny magnetic “rods” that are aligned by either north or south to represent the binary language. When you computer’s hard drive writes data it aligns these “rods” with either their north or south poles up to indicate 1’s and 0’s. I know, very technical stuff, but important to know.
When you erase the files all you are really doing is deleting a pointer to that file. Your computer’s operating system won’t know where the file is and therefore it appears to be gone. In actuality those little “rods” are still aligned the way they were before and anybody with the right software can see them and recover the data they stores. The only sure way to effectively erase the file is to overwrite those 1’s and 0’s with new data. Although you should be aware that even a simple one-pass overwriting will still leave the original data intact. It is really too complicated to explain in the context of this post but you need to overwrite several times to be sure that your information is forever and permanently gone.
To securely erase those files we recommend using Anti Tracks:
Anti Tracks is a complete solution to protect your privacy and enhance your PC performance. With Anti Tracks you can securely erase your internet tracks, computer activities and programs history information even those are stored in hidden files on your computer.
Finally whichever your choice is you absolutely need to consider using something to erase your sensitive information. Especially if you ever plan to sell your computer to someone else. Simply formatting your hard drive won’t do it. The best software to use is up to you, but get one of them! It doesn’t really take that much time to make sure you are secure!
