There are often questions asked when changing or buying a new computer about the process of Hard Drive Wipe. The process for wiping or cleaning your personal data is quite simple as one might think. To completely wipe off your data you will have to write over the data. Simply reformatting the drive or just deleting all the files will not help. Fortunately there are a number of inexpensive and free wipe programs, which are also called as shedders can cover the data with random pattern or zeroes, which makes the data restoration software unreadable. However, there are some machines that can recover the data that has been written over only a few times. This is where the secure erase standards like the department of defense 5220.22-M will have to be referred. The specification of this read as, if you overwrite the drive three times according to the specifications it would be difficult to recover the data. However, a number of professionals would recommend you to overwrite the data seven times to ensure you have completely wiped off your hard drive making it completely unrecoverable. Sometimes reading the data that has been overwritten by a shredder would require expensive hardware, so if you are not worried about the professional data thefts then a careful overwriting is also not required.

One thing that your must always keep in mind is that just deleting your sensitive file or data will not protect you fully. This is because there may be unidentified copies of your file or data that can exist in some unused part of your swap files or in the hard rive and can also be in other possible locations. You can be on a safer side if you just wipe off your entire area of your hard drive or you can just go the definite route and clean up your entire hard drive. If you want to wipe off specific files and the free space of your hard drive then there are a number of software's that can help your and even software's to overwrite your hard drive three times.

If you want to get rid of your old hard drive or want to sell off your old computer it is very important that you take maximum precautions in cleaning off all your personal and sensitive files or data before selling off your hard drive. Although it is very difficult to recover the lost data on any hard drive it is not also impossible. However, data can be recovered at some degree. This task can be made impossible, if you follow proper specifications. One thing you should always keep in mind is that deleting files or data or just formatting your hard drive is not sufficient to completely wipe off your hard drive. To be sure that you have completely wiped off you fines you should use a erasing or wiping service. There are tools to help you clean off your hard drive, which will overwrite every sector on your hard drive. One of the most important things you must remember before selling off your hard drive or computer is preparing your hard drive or emptying it to be on a safer side.