Secure PC disposal
One aspect of computer management often over looked is that of what to do with personal computers, laptops and servers once they reach the end of their useful life. The most important factor is that these machines will contain valuable and confidential data. Just deleting this data will not remove it securely from a machine. It is relatively easy for a knowledgeable computer user to recover deleted data from a PC, laptop or server.
Data can be recovered using one of literally hundreds of data recovery products, some of which are free on the Internet. Deleting partitions or reformatting will not work either as there are many ways to recover deleted partitions or recovering from a format. It is not even necessary to have the machine as data can easily be recovered by connecting a drive to another computer.
Company data falling into the wrong hands could be damaging in all sorts of ways. Financial loss to the business, loss of customer confidence, loss of reputation, even legal action for failure to secure data and breaching data protection legislation. There have been numerous high profile cases of government data falling into the wrong hands which highlight some of the risks.
Many people think "if I delete the data and format the disk then no one would bother trying to recover my data and in any case there is nothing confidential on it". On the confidentiality front, people can be very creative, finding ways to misuse other peoples data. Could anyone be bothered, possibly not but hackers spend huge amounts of time trying to get into people's systems. A computer hard disk full of data would be a treasure trove for them. Would you want to take the risk?
Other considerations are what to do with the physical machine. It is illegal to dump them so they must be sent to a licensed recycling company who will charge for disposal. Some companies want to donate old machines to charities or third world countries. This is a good for the environment and means more use for older machines.
Whatever is done with these machines it is important that they are securely erased before disposal.
There are three main ways of destroying data from a computer hard disk.
- A software program is used that writes meaningless data to every part of the disk. This destroys all data. Some programmes make more than one pass and this is required to comply with some standards. The drive will still work so the machine can be reused.
- Degaussing involves removing the drive and subjecting it to a very strong magnetic field, which destroys all the data and usually damages the device so it can't be reused. This needs specialist and very expensive hardware which is also very heavy, so is not very mobile.
- Physical destruction means exactly that but obviously the device can't be reused. This must be done in a safe and effective way which is not practical in the office environment.
If a machine is to be reused the only option is software based erasure. There are many solutions for this. To complete this task the machine needs to be set up with power, a monitor and keyboard. To make this task as easy as possible Atomik.biz favours using a bootable CD with the erasure software on it. This is much quicker to boot, the machine does not have to have a working operating system and it is not necessary to know the password. When wiping multiple machines this will save time and therefore money. As the software has to write data to every part of the disk it will take some time, typically 20 minutes to an hour per disk depending on the performance of the machine and the size of the disk drive.
Wiping servers can be more complicated as data is usually stored in fault tolerant RAID systems. These usually need additional drivers to load so can't be erased using the same bootable CD as laptops and PCs. Depending on the hardware there are various options for wiping servers.
The Atomik.biz solution for disposal of machines is to run a software-erase program on each machine which are then collected by a partner company. There is often no charge for collection, but this may vary depending on numbers of machines and collection costs. These machines are refurbished and reused.