The Tech Doctor: Are Your Discarded PCs Really Clean?
How to ensure your information stays protected
By Jonathan McCallister It’s inevitable. You purchase new PCs for your practice, and an employee approaches you with the question: “What are we doing with our old computers? My sister/cousin/neighbor/church could really use one, and if you’re just going to throw them out … (insert guilt here).”
I’ve heard every variant of this question — posed by CEOs to receptionists alike — each looking to obtain a used PC for their son, daughter, church, charity, home office, or use it as a component for their home stereo system (really).
Before the Good Samaritan in you hands one of your replaced PCs over, there are a few things you may want to take into account before proceeding with this act of kindness. After all, no good (technology) deed goes unpunished.
“But I pressed ‘delete’…”
We’ve all seen TV crime dramas in which a tech-savvy criminal is tracked down by a team of experts who study data from his home PC — usually information he thought he’d erased. Data recovery is not just the stuff of television. When you hit the delete key, it rarely means that the file is gone forever. Often a remnant image of the file still exists on your computer’s hard drive. In most cases, deleting a file essentially tells your computer that new disk space is available for rewriting with new data … but the old data still exists until your computer writes over that available space. Continued...
