Consumer Reports: Wipe the data from your old devices
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What’s on your personal computer? Your name, your bank account, even your credit-card information. The same with your phone. And recycling electronic devices without erasing that info is asking for trouble. You are literally giving your personal information out to the criminal world.
The best way to protect yourself is to erase your personal data. On the iPhone it’s easy. Go to “Settings.” Click on “General,” then press “Reset” and select “Erase All Content and Settings.”
Consumer Reports’ computer expert says that erasing info on Android phones is a little more complicated. Usually you go to “Settings” and choose “Privacy.” Then you have to consult the manual online for the next steps.
To erase a personal computer, you need to download software. A good choice is from dban.org. You download the software and put it onto a CD. Then you put the CD into the computer’s disc drive and follow the instructions to erase the hard drive’s contents.
With Apple computers, the original operating system DVD comes with software to erase your files. You put it into the computer’s disc drive and reboot the computer, holding down the “C” key during start-up. Once the computer is booted up, choose “Utility,” then “Disc Utility.” Select “Hard drive,” then hit “Erase.”
After you have erased your computer and cell phones, Consumer Reports says to double-check that everything is gone. And cell phones also come with external cards. If you don’t plan to keep the card, erase it as well.
Complete Ratings and recommendations on all kinds of products, including appliances, cars & trucks, and electronic gear, are available on Consumer Reports’ website. Subscribe to ConsumerReports.org.
Give me a baseball bat and 5 minutes outside and ill wipe your devices for free....
Oh with Deban you can Zero out the HDD too that takes hours, But, It destroys every single piece of data. stored on it. and you have to even go in to doss to re initialize the HDD.
I have D Ban, it does destroy data and can not be rebuilt.
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Physically destroy the hard drive. Scratch the platters inside and bend them. CR mentions using DBAN software which I would recommend only if you want to re-use the hard drive later or give it to someone else. DBAN also takes many many hours to complete. If you don't intend someone to ever use the drive again, you should make the drive physically unusable. Otherwise the data is still available, regardless of formatting or over-writing with zeros/ones.
 @Rebel Words I do that too great for anger management.
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i totally destroyed a broken toaster for this reason. don't want any thieves stealing data from it
You should always wipe-erase your drives before you donate or sell your computer or other data driven device. Remember restoring a phone does not delete anything either. it is still there.
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Some things to think about. I have discovered that drives, hard drives, are actually quite robust. A Degaussing machine does not wipe drives from about 2000 on. You will need to wipe those drives with software.
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Here is a tool for PCs (Windows/Linux/OSX etc)
http://how-to-erase-hard-drive.com/
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For ARM devices (like phones) a way to do this is to delete all information from the device, then use some method to fill the hard drive of the device with junk data. I commonly use a set of very large videos that I put on the device several times.
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The thing to remember is, formatting, deleting or resetting only makes the data unavailable to a person who uses the device from the OS. Crude tools exist to retrieve data from these devices from the Internet and thieves commonly use them to steal information.
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Even a full data wipe (single pass erase) only makes it so these tools are no longer useful. It takes several passes of this kind to actually make the data not retrievable for more sophisticated tools.
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The more sensitive or paranoid you are, the further you can take this.
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But bear in mind, the DOD uses a three stage wipe/erase process (all 1's all 0's "random" 1's and 0's) to wipe national secrets.Â
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 @Repoman hmm thermite does a nice job of wiping drives as does Thermate.
 @Repoman Really, then can you explain 3 PCs that a freind gave me that had the oficial government seal on it . they were the old 386's and 486's and one P4, they all had serial numbers, credit cards, SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS, officers, and hell of a lot of data on the systems. I called the DOD and reported it , Iwas expecting full armored vehicles to show up with M 16s in hand and soe one with a bull horn give me explicit instructions on how to bring the PCS out. But this was back in early 2000, where ID theft was extremely rare. You know what the person told me to do? Well rather asked me to do?
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Can I trust you to destroy the drive for us? I mean really, If I really wanted to do some damaged I really could have. I have 3 witnesses that can bear to this testimony.
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I bet if this were happen to day the entire FBI , DOD. NSA, and all the other forces would be at my door step with Black Hawk Choppers buzzing about. Or 2 men in black with no names and blank faces stating "Were here to get the pcs.." But more then likely in real life, they probably would send a military official in a marked vehicle to recover the items with no attention drawn.
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It can be very easily explained, a lazy tech worker, or an ignorant one.
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I would pay someone $100 if they could find a drive from OHSU dating from 2007-2008 that had data on it.
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Unrecoverable.
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LOL and I suppose thermite does a fine job of making data on a storage device unrecoverable. Just don't let the helicopters see you do it. Fire danger season and all.
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Physical destruction is the only way to assure data elimination. Drive over it, smash it with an axe, or boil it to make sure!
Care needs to be taken to truly clean a computer hard drive. Erasing the drive typically only removes the first letter of each file but leaves the file itself intact.   The file can be recovered easily. Programs designed to truly clean a drive not only erase the file but overright the space on the disk as many as 7 times to clearly scrub the disk clean. Simply formatting a hard drive will not necessarily clean it of all file information.
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I personally remove the drives of any computer I am recycling and physically destroy them, including the disks inside. It is the only truly safe way to clean the data from a computer.
When I recycle computer hard drives, there is nothing left useable on them. Older small drives, I open and take the magnets out, they are great for attaching to tool boxes.
A friend uses his for target practice.
On other drives I f'disk then format them. All data is wiped clean and clear.
We have found computers with tons of data from the surplus sales also