Wiping you hard drive

When you dispose of your computer, it is time to protect your privacy or trade secrets. After having copied all important files to your new computer, you have to remove all data on the old harddisk for good.

Simply deleting the files the normal way is not enough, as a normal delete does not really delete the files. It only only marks the files as deleted by removing them from the list of files. Until the files are physically overwritten on the hard disc, it is often possible to "undelete" them.

Wipe is a program that erases a file or a disk partition by overwriting it 34 times with different bitpatterns. It is a command-line program and in order to use it, you have to know how files and partitions are named in Linux. But it is probably a good thing that there is not just a menu option that erases your harddisk forever.

Wipe is invoked by typing the following in a terminal:

	wipe filename

E.g. "wipe /dev/hda" vill erase the first IDE disk.

In Windows

For windows we recommend Eraser

Recycle harddisks

Many older computer are donated to charities like projects in the third world. Due to fear of leak of private information, more and more donaters physically destroy the harddisks before donating. But with a program as "wipe" it is possible to remove all data on the disk without destroying it. And by using Polippix you can do the wiping of the disk yourself.