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The important lesson of wiping your hard drive clean before getting rid of it! For those of you that don't know, your hard drive data is much easier to recover in most cases than you think. Hard drive data recovery technology is improving and "disk doctors" are coming out more and more successful in cases where hard drives are damaged by fire, shock, water, scratches, smashing, and even BULLETS.
Here's the simple explanation of how a hard drive works. Your data is written to a place (sector) on the hard drive and will sit there. Your hard drive knows where all of it's data is located by a master boot record at the "front" of the disk. Whenever you make a command to delete a file, the master boot record makes a note to allow that file-space to be available to be over-written by another file. Basically, your data is never really deleted until you over-write it. This is what makes data-recovery possible because it is still sitting on your hard drive even though you thought you deleted it. Meaning of course, that be deleting something it only means that you've marked the file-space as "available" for another file to take its place. There has been tons of horror stories where people format their hard drives or delete all the info, thinking the hard drive is "safe" enough to throw away, or sell to someone else. There are always constant stories of people having their hard drives end up in the end of data recovery thieves who look up the supposed "lost data" and steal their identity and more! So what IS the proper way to erase a hard drive? Well, the best solution out there that's even used by the Department of Defense is DBAN (Darik's Nuke and Boot) available at http://dban.sourceforge.net/ This program thoroughly erases your hard drive by overwriting the disk multiple times and makes it impossible for anyone to recover any data from it. It "Nukes" your hard drive data and guarantees that nobody will ever have access to it. Hell if it's good enough for the government, it should be good enough for all of us.
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