Although you can make it very difficult for someone to
recover files, with the right amount of equipment, time and money sometimes
files can still be recovered.
So truly the only way to ever get rid of files is to
melt your hard drive.
A hard drive wipe can be a good thing to perform if
your computer ever gets a bad virus that is difficult to remove. Performing
a wipe can help to completely get rid of the virus once and for all.
It is also good to perform a hard drive wipe if you are
going to sell your computer to someone. This way they can never recover and
see your important banking information or other sensitive data.
You have a couple of options if you want to perform a
complete hard drive wipe. One is you can use a program that will completely
wipe the drive.
With a program like this you will lose all of you
data. So make sure you have a good back up plan before you perform such an
action.
A program that will perform a hard drive wipe to this
level is darik’s nuke disk. You can get it here.
http://dban.sourceforge.net/
For most people looking to do a hard drive wipe, they
will just want to get rid of files on their computer. You may want to erase
banking or other information.
You can use the other hard drive wipe programs on the
market.
These usually are installed on the windows operating
system and allow you to use a right click menu to delete files.
Either way when looking to do a wipe a drive, figure
out what is you really want to accomplish and always make sure you have a
data backup plan in mind before you perform a hard drive wipe.
