As you’re about to learn, just because you hit Shift plus Delete doesn’t mean that file is gone for good. If you’re trying to dispose or sell your old hard disks, check more than once because your files may not have really gone anywhere. There’s a reason Santa checks his naughty-and-nice list twice. A study in 2003 by data privacy experts says old drives for sale may still contain information that previous owners thought were expunged. In a USA Today report, the researchers bought 158 old hard drives for sale on eBay and tried to recover as much data as possible from them. It didn’t take rocket science to unearth more than 5,000 pieces of sensitive info—SSNs, credit card numbers, personal records, etc. Any data security expert will tell you that this is a privacy nightmare. You can’t destroy data the Shift-plus-Delete way; you need a data recovery service in Los Angeles to sanitize it. Out of the 158 hard drives in the study, roughly a third of them were clean (yet, some data was still recovered from them). This implies that there’s a 66-percent chance online buyers will stumble upon an old hard disk in which the data is anything but gone. Take note that there are various programs miscreants can use to extract any data still left inside. Modern hard disks have evolved over the years that they’re built like tanks today. Even if you pour juice over the disk, data recovery still has some ways to extract data from it. Experts say you have to destroy the disk to eliminate the risk of identity theft; break it into pieces, drop it in lava, any method of physical destruction. The researchers recommend getting an external drive or any secure hardware for your sensitive info. External drives make sure you keep your files close to you at all times and lessen the risk of having someone access it under your nose. If you’re switching to a new drive in the PC, have a data recovery service in Los Angeles take care of the old one. Don’t think about selling them; brand new hard disks today are very affordable. For more information on the study, you can read the article at USAToday.com. If you need a professional to handle data recovery and sanitation, contact a service provider.
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