Eraser (software)
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Recently at work I have been assigned the task of wiping old hard drives “clean” and preparing them to be sold. In my line of work, I cannot simply reinstall the operating system or reformat a hard drive and sell it. I deal with highly sensitive data which can’t be compromised, so it needs to be destroyed. We usually keep hard drives and get rid of everything else so I have never used a program like this before.
I stumbled upon the program Eraser the other day and coincidentally enough, it was recommended to me a few days later by some IT auditors. So why might one need this program? Well, when you “delete” a file on your computer, it doesn’t really get deleted. Only the pointer to that file is removed from the file system. There are free programs on the Internet that can easily recover deleted data and put you at risk.
Eraser works by overwriting the hard drive numerous times using a special pattern. I went ahead and tested this software and it worked great! I installed the software on my main workstation , created a “Nuke Boot Disk” using a floppy disk, booted using the “Nuke Boot Disk, and it worked! Please do not run this on any production computer or server unless that was your intent. It took about 20 minutes to “nuke” a 20GB hard drive. So that’s 1 minute per gig. Anyways…the OS saw the hard drive as new. After installing Windows 2000, I installed a few recovery programs and they were unable to find or recover anything!
I would recommend this software to anyone wanting to remove data off their hard drives. To find out more about Eraser go here.
Harold – www.theofficecubicle.com
- Posted in: TECH TIPS!
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Great information! I’ll put that in my ‘desired software’ file. I know that it’s not often that I’d use something like this, but I’d like to have it in case it becomes necessary. I currently have two old hard drives that are in perfect working condition, they were replaced with larger faster drives. I’ve still been trying to figure out some use for them.