I am a long time Mac person who made the mistake of trying PC this year.
I want to donate my PC to a friend, but I want to make sure any and all business related items are off of it...and I mean really off....not just in the trash can and recycled.
Can anyone suggest a product or tell me the correct way to delete something off a PC so that it is really gone?
Absolute best way is to reformat the drive and reinstall the drivers and OS.
if you have a recovery disk, use it. It will restore the system to the same state that you bought it - with all proper drivers in place.
cheers,
Luke
Even formatting a drive will not necessarily prevent data from being restored; GetDataBack software can restore files after a drive has been formatted.
If you're concerned that someone might go digging around and intentionally trying to restore files you've deleted, you want to use a secure erase tool. These delete the files, delete the FAT, and write random data patterns multiple times over the sectors where the files were stored.
"Eraser" (the 2nd one) can either wipe the entire drive or selectively wipe files without destroying the OS files, so if you don't want to mess with reloading and know for sure where all your files are, that might be a quicker solution.
Here are two that are either free or very inexpensive ($20)
http://dban.sourceforge.net/
http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/
I've tried "http://dban.sourceforge.net/" before when I sold my PC, it took awhile to do its thing but I believe it worked great.
yah, that's the downside... any of these programs that "scrub" data from the drive tend to take forever, particularly with a big drive, because they are rewriting every sector on the drive multiple times, then rereading to ensure there's nothing left. It's one of those things you set up and come back a day or so later... :)
i use acronis security suite, its really good, you can set it to work overnight on things, i have it scrub the free space on my drive weekly, and also anything deleted from my trash can is automatically scrubbed. it also does the same on the temp folders of my web browser ( very important cause ya never know what is in there ) paranoia? I dont think so , you never know when you computers drive could break, your computer be stolen or any number of things that would love it exposed. I also use a fingerprint password system and encrypt all CBL related material. ok its 1 more step when opening a file but better than soemone else getting acess to it
Thanks for all the tips. I am not worried about them 'digging' for anything. I just didn't want anything to pop up or something.
I think I will just use the recovery dic like chilihost suggests. But thanks for all the other tips. Now I know what to do if I ever decide to give a computer to my mom and not just a friend. :shock:
i know very good program but i cant to post links...
Delete your porn and fill the hard drive with pics of kittens and bunnies.
Every time you put a new file on the computer it will overwrite a bit of your deleted stuff on the hard drive so that even data recovery won't be able to find the old stuff.
Sneaky.
Blum