How to Wipe Personal Info from Electronics
Do you have a bunch of gadgets gathering dust in your home? Want to make some extra cash by selling your old devices? You can – just make sure to clean all your personal info before selling them. Tech Talker teaches you how!
The holidays have been over for a while now and odds are, you probably have more than one device that is now sitting lonely on your shelf, ever since it was replaced by that shiny new phone, tablet, or computer you got as a gift. In this week’s episode, we will be dusting off those old electronics, clearing them out, and getting them ready to sell!
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Say you decide that you want to sell one or more of your older devices. However, now more than ever, these devices hold so much information about us that selling one that isn’t properly cleared is like giving away your identity to the highest bidder! This is a huge problem, but one that is easily avoided.
How to Erase Personal Data from Your Computer
Let’s talk about computers first. Computers hold a ton of information about you, and many people fear selling or even donating their older model computers because they don’t want the information stored on their hard drive getting into the wrong hands. It’s a very legitimate concern. You may have heard that formatting a hard drive is the answer to getting rid of all of your private information. While formatting a hard drive can certainly harm your data, it is definitely not a foolproof way to actually erase your data.
See also: How to Safely Recover and Delete Your Files
In fact, formatting the hard drive is just step one in the process of wiping your computer clean of your sensitive information. Formatting the hard drive is a lot like taking the label off a can of soup. It makes things a little ambiguous, but still leaves clues as to what is inside. What we want to do is open up the can and clean out the inside or, in the case of the hard drive, all of the ones and zeros that make up our pictures, videos, addresses, and operating system that were once stored on the hard drive.
This is a pretty painless process. For Mac users, simply insert the operating system disc that came with your computer and press the “C” button as the Mac boots. This will load an operating system from the CD which will allow you to make some changes. From here you will click Utilities and then Disk Utility and choose Erase. This selection will give you a number of choices for what to do next. You can simply record all zeros to the hard drive or write random data to the drive from 7 to 35 times. Just keep in mind that writing all zeros will take about half an hour, 7 passes of random data will take a few hours, and 35 passes of random data will take days!
After this step is complete, you’ll reinstall the operating system and voila, your Mac is clean and ready to sell!
If you have a Windows machine, this process is a little bit more difficult. My go-to solution is to get a free program called Darik’s Boot & Nuke. This program makes formatting your hard drive super simple. You download it, burn it to a CD, start up your PC, select the drive, and it takes care of the rest.
Once that’s done, just reinstall the operating system using the discs that came with your computer and your PC will be squeaky clean and good to go! This is because Darik’s Boot & Nuke takes care of all the deleting!
Here’s how to do it on Windows 8!
How to Erase Personal Data from Your Tablet and Smartphone
Next, let’s move on to those pesky phones and tablets. Phones and tablets contain a ton of sensitive information. After all, we cart these devices everywhere we go. We keep our contacts, emails, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, Pinterest, and well a majority of our lives on these devices! This is even more of a reason that you want to make sure that your device is securely wiped clean before you sell or donate it.
For anything with iOS installed on it, (that means Apple products like iPods, iPhones, iPads, and iPad Minis) you can simply click Settings, General, Reset, and Erase All Content and Settings. This will completely wipe your iOS device, and basically take it back to factory conditions. I like to do this twice, even though once is generally accepted as good enough.
For an Android device, the process is a little bit different, but still pretty easy. You’ll need to navigate to Settings, then to Privacy and then select the option for Factory Data Reset. Just like that, your device will be set back to brand new! The only thing about this is that it doesn’t clear your phone’s SD card as well. I recommend deleting everything off of the SD card such as the files or music stored on it, then formatting it, and erasing it by filling it in with random data or all zero’s using one of the programs I mentioned.
For phones it is also important to remember to take out the SIM card. A SIM card is a slim little piece of plastic that carries the information which connects your phone to your mobile service provider. Simply consult your user manual on how to do remove the SIM card from your specific device.
Tech Talker’s Final Trick to Wipe Your Devices Clean
Here’s another little trick that I always use to make sure that everything personal has been wiped from my devices. After formatting the device’s internal drive, I write a bunch of large files to it (such as large movies that contain nothing personal). Then I format the drive again and conclude by either writing zeros or random impersonal data to the drive.
Why do this? Well, if someone gets their hands on your device and wants to pull personal data, they can use software which would look for patterns in erased data. This clever software looks for remnants of files that were once located on the drive after it had been erased. These files are pretty easy to recover if all you’ve done is format the drive. Recovering any data after it has been erased and recorded over by zeros or random data would be next to impossible. However, if those fancy data recovery algorithms do detect the remnant of a file, it will be of something that has no personal information related to you at all!
This may seem pretty crazy, but it’s a little extra step that I feel is worth it to safeguard my data.
Here are your 3 Quick and Dirty Tips for wiping all of your devices clean:
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Formatting a hard drive does not erase all of the information on the drive.
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In order to fully get rid of personal information on a hard drive, format it, then write random zeros and/or random data to the drive.
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Phones and tablets should always be reset to factory settings and the SIM card should be removed.
Well, that’s it for today! Be sure to check out all my earlier episodes at techtalker.quickanddirtytips.com. And if you have further questions about this podcast or want to make a suggestion for a future episode, post your comments on the Tech Talker Facebook page.
Until next time, I’m the Tech Talker, keeping technology simple!
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About the Author
Tech Talker demystifies technology and cutting edge devices so that even the most tech illiterate can understand what’s going on with their computer or gadget — and what to do when something goes wrong.
