How to wipe data completely from hard drive
Most of the time when you plan to sell or dump your computer, then simply deleting the content, empting the Recycle Bin or formatting the entire drive does not completely erase the data from the drive. There are many third party utilities which are available in market using which any one can restore your sensitive content from your formatted hard drive. Then how to wipe data completely from the hard drive before selling it or dumping it? The only way is to overwrite the content present on the drive repeatedly, by randomly selected data. This can be done with effective digital file shredder, which will completely destroy the data making it impossible to be recovered. The one, which is available in market, is Remo File Eraser.
There is a big difference between just erasing or deleting the file and data wiping. Whenever, you delete data using Windows “Delete” key function it can be recovered from Recycle Bin, but empting the Recycle Bin or deleting the data with “Shift+Del” key combination does not make the data lost forever until the space it used is overwritten by new information. In this case of deleting the files, the operating system marks the space as available for reuse. So we can say that the previous data can be restored back using data recovery software. However, in case of data wiping, the important data is replaced by the garbage data by overwriting the data on the storage device. Therefore, once the data wiping is performed, no recovery tool can retrieve the data back.
You can manually clean the disk but this will take considerably a long time, and there is a chance that you miss few things. In order to maintain privacy of data from others with less effort before selling your computer or hard drive, then you can wipe the drive. This will completely erase all your documents, applications, passwords etc from your drive and makes it unrecoverable. The best data wiping software, which will erase the data permanent, is Remo File Eraser.
Remo File Eraser provides you the easiest and straightforward interface for data wiping. This software uses nine different shredding complex patterns, which ensures complete security of your data. The nine different data shredding patterns are US Department of Defense (DoD 5220.22-M) + Gutmann Method, Peter Gutmann Secure Deletion, DOD Standard 5220.28 STD, North Atlantic Treaty Organization – NATO standard, German: VSITR, Fast Zero Overwrite, Random Overwrite, US Department of Defense (DOD 5220.22-M), and US Navy NAVSO P-5239-26 – RLL. This utility supports FAT32,FAT16, NTFS5, NTFS formatted drives. This tool provides data wiping on hard drives, external HDD, flash cards like SD cards, MMC etc. The demo version of this software is available free. You can download it. If you find it to be the ultimate software for data wiping then you can purchase the licensed version later.