Saturday, January 19, 2013

Hard Drive Shredding And Other Data Deletion Methods

By Claudine MacDonald


Hard drive shredding Austin is being offered by lots of service providers these days. This is due to the demand for data security which would mean a lot to customers. Even companies can be held liable for their loss such as those in the medical community. Countless methods for sure data destruction have been made to address to this need.

Soft copies of data, even when deleted, could still be retrieved. They leave behind traces that even nonexperts are capable of accessing. Data may contain sensitive personal information such as health records, emails, credit and bank account numbers and passwords, or social security information. There have been a lot of identity theft cases and manipulation of data that have been reported. This calls for secure methods of handling them.

Some people would opt to manually destroy their drives through different means. Some of these ways may be ridiculous such as having them blow torched, bashed with hammers, burned, soaked in different solutions, and other countless methods. That may be done when one is only securing personal data. However, there are safety issues with these methods. It is also not possible for medium to large companies to employ these methods. A professional means have to be employed so as to make it safe and secure. That is where service providers come in.

Overwriting can be done to destroy hardware that contains sensitive data. This method is done by replacing data with meaningless characters with different patterns. This is usually done before degaussing. However, this process is complicated. More than a single pass would need to be done and this could be time consuming. The one who does this would also need to be knowledgeable of the process and must be patient in doing the overwriting process repeatedly in order to wipe out valuable information. US Department of Defense have implemented guidelines on properly doing this.

The next process is to degauss. This would cause loss of magnetic fields that is a mechanism for storing information. Rare natural magnets or devices can be used. They have to be capable of transmitting electromechanical pulses powerful enough to cancel magnetic fields. Purchasing of equipment that are capable of doing this is not recommended because different models have different specifications that are intended for different drives.

Crushing is another method that can be employed for destroying information-carrying hardware. They can either be manually operated or powered by other sources. Extreme pressure would be employed to hardware so that they get destroyed permanently. However, they are only applicable for smaller quantities. Unlike degaussing method, data is still intact though it will be extremely difficult to retrieve it.

Shredding is the most common method that is being used to destroy hardware. There are a lot of equipment that are able to do this and can be used for other information carrying hardware such as electronic organizers, PDAs, and even cell phones. There are models capable of destroying as much as 2,500 drives within an hour only.

Rotary knife mills, known as a disintegrators, are capable of incinerating materials to very small pieces. They actually apply same principles as shredders but are more powerful. The end products would be hard to reconstruct or recognize anymore. Data, though not erased, is impossible to retrieve since the material holding them have been turned to smaller pieces. However, there are more maintenance needs compared to shredders.

These different methods of data deletion is important to many businesses. Outsourcing hard drive shredding Austin is now widely in demand because of this. Their services play a very important role in securing businesses and their customers.




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