At Data Recycling of New England, we take data destruction – including hard drive blanking – seriously. For many individuals and corporations, when a piece of computer equipment is no longer needed and is being upgraded, the most usual course of action is for it to be taken out of commission and put into a storage closet somewhere or donated. In most cases the data from the machine is deleted – usually in the most rudimentary way. Files are simply selected and deleted, and then the “trash” is emptied. Programs that may contain proprietary information are uninstalled, and – if the owner is extremely fastidious – the system may be reformatted.
These steps are, of course, excellent preliminary steps to take – but for an organization (or individual) that has extremely confidential or proprietary information on their hard drive these steps are simply not enough. The issue with taking only these steps is that although easy-access to the data has been removed, the data itself still exists on the system. Moving items to the trash and emptying the trash does nothing more than make the files a bit harder to find on the system. In fact, it’s quite easy to download software that will make it possible to restore every deleted item on a hard drive.
The proper way to ensure that data is no longer accessible on a hard drive – whether you’re throwing it away (although you should really consider recycling it!) or donating it – is to do a complete data wipe, or to blank it. The appropriate government standard for this is called DoD 5220.22-M and essentially involves completely overwriting all the data on the hard drive, creating an unreadable scramble of characters, and thus preventing the data from being accessible or readable, regardless of which type of program is used in an attempt to recover it.
We use the government DoD 5220.22-M protocol to ensure that nothing remains of your confidential data. And, beyond electronic data destruction, we have the capability to physically shred your hard drive so that there is absolutely no possibility of your data falling into the wrong hands. For businesses with many hard drives that need blanking, we offer curbside pickup, as well as onsite hard drive shredding at an affordable price.
For more information, and to schedule either a pick-up or an onsite hard drive shredding event, give us a call at (508) 822-2054 or email us at info@datarecyclingne.com.
