How to retire your PC?

[Blackmist]

Just do a simple full format (not a quick format). Or keep it as a backup/storage drive.

You can waste time overriding it with zeros and random data multiple times, but you can't get anything back either way.

[Lathais]

Just do a simple full format (not a quick format). Or keep it as a backup/storage drive.

You can waste time overriding it with zeros and random data multiple times, but you can't get anything back either way.

Maybe you or I can't, but data can definitely be recovered from a drive after a single full format. Really depends on how sensitive your data really is though. Yeah, your average home user, no one is going to care about stealing your data so it's not really a big deal.

[Kazgrel]

Zero the drive, as noted by others, or simply remove it from the machine and re-use it/magnetize it/smash it.

[chazus]

Personally, I don't 'retire' systems. They either get repurposed, given to a friend/family, or sold. That said, if it's going out of my possession, I just do a double pass 0-fill and call it a day. Nobody is getting the data.

At work, any hard drives that are brought in, working or not, that are to be 'recycled' are physically smashed. We usually use a sledge hammer, but from time to time we play with an impact drill.

[Deleted]

Yes, you can safely erase the data using tools, but overwriting a disk multiple times is not necessary in my opinion.

Companies specialized in data recovery keep their knowledge about what is, and what is not possible a secret, because know-how is their business, and equipment is expensive as fuck. But restoring data from a mangled or burned device is most certainly much easier than recovering overwritten files.

The myth about the recoverability of overwritten data, as far as I can tell, comes from some old papers where it has been stated that you may theoretically be able to get some sort of magnetic information about the last state of a byte after it has been rewritten. But to do that practically and reliably on a large scale to even retrieve a single file is just impossible. And most of this information comes from a time when hard disks were small in capacity and the physical size of a magnetic byte was huge compared to today. Nobody has ever recovered whole megabyte-sized files that have been completely overwritten even only once, and told the story.

It would require the data written on to a clean, previously unused disk, then wiped only once with non-random data, and after that an immediate rescue attempt with an electron microscope bit per bit. Then you would have a "good probability to recover a single bit", but that is just not good enough to recover a whole file without it being completely corrupted. This is especially bad news for compressed files, such as JPEG images, ZIP archives and Word/Excel files, since they rely on not having redundant information.

By that measure a full reformat, overwriting the whole disk once, is much safer than drilling a hole in it, if you are scared of professional data recovery, money no object, or even the FBI. If you just don't want the kids to search your trash and steal your old drive, drilling a hole prevents that one just nicely. And it is much quicker, which is why companies do it.

The one thing you must not do, is a quick format, because that only removes the file table.

Further information:
https://security.stackexchange.com/q...manence-a-myth

[Tennis]

Personally, I don't 'retire' systems. They either get repurposed, given to a friend/family, or sold. That said, if it's going out of my possession, I just do a double pass 0-fill and call it a day. Nobody is getting the data.

At work, any hard drives that are brought in, working or not, that are to be 'recycled' are physically smashed. We usually use a sledge hammer, but from time to time we play with an impact drill.

Well I have too many at the moment. My current laptop is really slow so there's little point in using it anymore. However, before sending it off for recycling, I'd like to be sure that my personal data is gone.

What'sa double pass o fill? I've seen certain programs which supposedly write over the data.

[Cilraaz]

What'sa double pass o fill? I've seen certain programs which supposedly write over the data.

Double pass 0-fill would be overwriting all data with zeroes twice. A single pass can sometimes leave recoverable data. DBAN is typically the most suggested application for zeroing out a drive.

[johnworsham]

Great advice. Surely will do.