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Selling, giving away or
donating your old computer?
Do you really want to leave ALL your
information on your hard drive?
Maintain data confidentiality by preventing access to information previously stored on computers transferred to new users or destined for
surplus!
Due to the way data is written to a hard drive, format or Fdisk
alone is not sufficient to remove data. After formatting, data may
remain in bad blocks and spare blocks and can be recovered by simply
reallocating spare blocks or unmarking bad blocks.
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Software sanitizing is the preferred method for expensive hard drives for redeployment, lease return or
for sale in the secondary market. |
If your business is donating any PCs to charity, you should sanitize the
hard drive thus avoiding sensitive or confidential data exposed to prying eyes. It is NOT sufficient to delete files.
Deleting selected files from the computer and even formatting the hard drive (s)
does not prevent subsequent recovery and use of this information. Either remove the hard drive or utilize
a method for removing the data completely from the drives.
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You need to be aware that hard
drives have properties that cause data to remain, even after you think you’ve erased it. This is referred to as data
ghosting, which is the residual physical bits of data that has been in some way erased or cleared. |
To properly sanitize a drive, ALL data must be overwritten at every addressable location on the media. An effective
solution writes to active and inactive file space, bad sectors and tracks, the space between the end of a file and the end of a block or sector, file allocation tables, directories and block maps.
This process assures information is unrecoverable by electronic means.
Media sanitized by software overwriting solutions do not harm physical storage devices so they can be reused.
Degaussing causes the loss of timing tracks and renders a hard drive inoperable.
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Florida PC Paramedics's Information
Assurance and Security Services are Guaranteed! |
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