The Problem
Today, I decided that I was going to retire a Maxtor 160GB firewire external hard drive and sell it on eBay. The problem that I needed to solve was ensuring that the data I had on the drive was really deleted. While this particular drive contained only music files, I wanted to be 100% certain that the buyer would not be able to recover any data.
In the financial services industry (I’m in the mortgage business), good data security practices are mandated by law and essential to protecting private financial information.
Over the last five years, the price per Gigabyte (GB) of storage on an external hard drive has decreased along with their size. External drives are smaller, faster, and hold more data.
Since a multiple drive backup plan is simple and relatively inexpensive to deploy, I’ve added new drives to my backup solution at a rate of one per year. As more data comes to reside under my ‘digital’ tent, the number of external hard drives in my home has increased.
For what it’s worth, I also write to a DVD burner. Originally, I wanted to use the iTunes backup utility but I have found that DVD’s are also a useful way to share data with others. While my backup plan needs streamlining, the foundation for a safe recovery in the event disaster strikes is in place.
Isn’t the file gone when it is deleted?
No it isn’t. When you delete a file, you aren’t really deleting the file. You are deleting the information that tells the operating system where the file is stored. In order to really delete the information, an overwrite of the data is required. Robin Harris covers the proper how-to on secure drive deletion at ZDNet, How to really erase a hard drive.
Reason to own a Mac (#198)
It appears that the Mac OS has built-in functionality to safely remove data while Windows XP requires a third party application to accomplish the same result. Hivelogic explains the process on a Mac, How to Securely Erase Storage Media in Mac OS X.
Regardless of your operating system, it’s a good idea to delete your information securely and it’s easy to do it right, on your own.
