DriveScrubber

The world is a surprisingly small place, and as a species, we’re unusually messy and destructive. But the last few years have seen an impressive increase in awareness of the importance of recycling. Instead of just throwing things away as soon as we’ve finished with them, many of us go to considerable lengths to dispose of waste properly, and where possible to re-use whatever we can.

At risk of sounding insane, PCs and their hardware are fast approaching the point where they’re getting too cheap. From a consumer’s point of view this is good news, as it means that we can easily afford a top of the range PC every couple of years or so without having to blink about it. But what do we do with the old equipment?

If you’re anything like me, you lucky person you, then you probably have more than a few boxes of old PC hardware. Old memory chips, monitors, sound and graphic cards, ZIP drives, a bewildering range of keyboards and mice and enough old hard drives to build a small extension to your home.

Many of these are as good as useless, and simply won’t work with new equipment and/or operating systems. Yet still we can’t bear to part with them, right? But old hard drives seem to be the exception to the rule. While they may not be large or fast enough to be used as primary drives, they make great secondary drives, and are ideal for storing large data files, digital photos, music, and so on.

The problem is that when you give away your old hard drive, you might want to consider what you might be inadvertently sharing. My days of working with Scotland Yard and the CIA never really took off unfortunately, so you might think that I have nothing to hide on my hard drive.

But this actually isn’t the case. Many people’s PCs contain a lot more private information than they might realise. For instance I wouldn’t really want anyone to know all my bank account details, my private correspondence, my credit card information, business details, trade secrets, details of my Swiss gold account, tax returns, e-mail, and more.

That’s information you want to keep to yourself, right?

And here’s the kicker. Deleting this information doesn’t get rid of it. And neither does formatting your hard drive.

Read the last sentence again. Even a full system format of the hard drive will leave everything in place, and even a non-technical person can get hold of some very easy to find software that will recover everything. And I mean everything.

Luckily a solution exists - that means you can safely give away any form of drive with no risk of your personal data being recovered.

DriveScrubber, by iolo technologies, LLC, is an easy-to-use utility designed to securely wipe all data from any hard or floppy drive, regardless of its file format or operating system.

Its purpose is to ensure the safety, privacy, and security of your private, personal, confidential, or proprietary information. Once a drive has been wiped with DriveScrubber, no attempts (regardless of their level of sophistication) will be able to recover any data that previously existed thereon.

DriveScrubber uses methods approved by the US Department of Defense (DoD 5220.22) to ensure that ALL data on ANY drive is permanently disposed of, beyond ALL possible techniques of recovery. It works by using techniques independent of standard operating systems which allow it to begin wiping data at the absolute beginning of a drive and continue until the absolute end. With no technical experience or explosives required. Meaning that your drives will be scrubbed clean of all data that may be hiding anywhere that standard formatting or operating system based utilities cannot reach.

Now that’s peace of mind!

Further details and a free 30 day trial version are available from the iolo technologies Web site.