Let’s say you have a hard drive that you have been using for a number of years now. It has an older version of Windows on it and you feel you no longer need it. Maybe you are throwing it away, or maybe you are giving it to someone else. However, along with Windows, it also contains family pictures, tax information, and other personal files you don’t necessarily want to share with the rest of the world. If you simply rely on formatting it before letting it go, you may not be protecting that information as well as you might think.
This has been a common fallacy that people have relied on for many years. Creating a false sense of hope, while personal information remained accessible to anyone, if they really wanted to see it. The problem is, that formatting a drive doesn’t actually strip it of the data on it. It simply prepares the drive to replace the data with new data (a new file table laid over the top of the old).
Until new data has completely overwritten the old, some (or even a lot) of that data can be restored/retrieved using specialized software. This software can be obtained by anyway and is available online or sometimes even in stores.
An example of this is EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard, which has made its way to the top of the list over the years. The name has been around for quite some time now and the accessibility to the software is quite convenient. There is also Stellar and a number of options out there.
With these programs, you can sometimes quite easily recover plenty of information off of reformatted drives (hard drives, SSDs, thumb drives, SD cards, etc). A tool that can be quite useful for anyone who might have recently accidently reformatted, deleted something, or even experienced a drive that was failing and wanted to recover as much as possible from it. Nothing beats making backups before something bad happens, but if you forgot to and you thought the information was lost, this may not always be the case.
Of course, this means that anyone with the software could try to do the same. There are even free editions of some of these titles, although usually they want you to pay for a license if you want to be any useful (there is almost always a catch).
So how do you protect your data then?
This is a trick that requires all of the same. The right piece of software! You need to properly scrub your drive free of the files by using software that fills that space in with new data. Sometimes doing it multiple times (known as multiple passes) to make sure it is gone. These programs are frequently referred to as shredders and other fun terms.
Some of these are free as it is much easier to bury your information than it is to recover it. Software titles like CCleaner, Eraser, Moo0 File Shredder, PC Shredder, LockMyFile, and many others. These tools work to help protect your information from prying eyes.
Although, even these solutions aren’t perfect. Although consumers don’t normally have access to more powerful options, law enforcement and special data recovery agencies, do. There are, of course, evil doers out there that will have access to this as well. Not that the average joe would normally get any attention from such evil parties.
So it is important that, before you throw away or give away an old drive (let it be a spinning hard drive, SATA SSD, or NVMe), you thoroughly erase it first. It doesn’t matter if it came from Windows, Apple, or Linux environments. Shrud/scrub it good if you want your information protected. Or even better, take a power drill to it a few times and retire it for good.
