What to do Before Exchanging or Selling Laptop?
Most businesses and individuals sell or exchange laptop. This helps them in saving some money and reducing e-waste. If you’re one of them and planning to sell or exchange laptop, you have to take some precautions to safeguard your precious data and privacy before selling or exchanging your laptop.
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What are the Precautions Before Selling or Exchanging Laptop
Data security and privacy are the two factors that you must first consider while planning to sell the laptop. Your laptop contains sensitive, confidential, personal, and private data. Apart from the data that you actually save on your laptop, you may have noticed that the applications running on it also store sensitive data. For instance, the browser stores saved passwords, saved credit/debit card details, browsing history, cookies, autofill form data, and other internet activities on the laptop.
इस पोस्ट को हिंदी में पढ़ने के लिए यहां क्लिक करें।
All such personal and confidential data, if it ends up in the wrong hands, can harm you in many ways. You might have deleted all the data or formatted your laptop before selling it. But if you think that the data is permanently deleted from your laptop, then this is not the case. This deleted or formatted data can be easily recovered by using data recovery software.
| A study conducted by Stellar on 311 used devices revealed that more than 70% of these devices contained residual data such as PII, personal data, banking information, income tax records, and login credentials, etc. |
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Hence, before you sell your laptop, you must wipe it’s data properly. So, how do you erase your laptop data or delete data from it permanently? You can securely erase data on your laptop by using a drive erasure software like “BitRaser® Drive Eraser”. Formatting the hard drive or deleting the data doesn’t delete the data or erase your laptop.
How Data Eraser is Different From Data Deletion/Formatting?
When you delete files or other data from a storage device, it removes only the references, not the data. Similarly, when you format a drive, apart from replacing the file system on the drive, it removes references to all the data on the storage device while the data is still present on the device. Therefore, selling the laptop after simply deleting or formatting it exposes you to a risk of data breach/theft. In such a case, anyone who gets a hold of your laptop can use data recovery software to fetch your business or personal data from it and misuse it.
However, when you use the device wiping service or drive erasure software, the data on your laptop gets permanently deleted beyond the scope of recovery. Thus, it’s crucial to wipe the laptop before selling it to prevent a data breach.
Use BitRaser® Drive Eraser to Permanently Erase Data from Laptop
BitRaser® Drive Eraser is an advanced tool to securely erase data from a drive/disk. You can use this tool to wipe data permanently from your laptop before selling it. It destroys every bit of data from your laptop’s hard drive and wipes data by overwriting it with random binary values. The software is compliant with International data erasure standards such as NIST, US DOD 5220.22-M (7 passes), etc.
The software also generates a digitally signed data erasure report and a certificate of erasure. You can use them for audit trails and confirm the erasure of data beyond the scope of recovery.
Conclusion
If you’re planning to sell or exchange laptop, you must use drive erasure software, instead of formatting the drive or deleting the data. Merely formatting or deletion doesn’t erase/wipe the data. It only removes the path of the files, not the actual data. Thus, exposing you to the risk of a data breach.
Data erasure software such as BitRaser® Drive Eraser ensures the destruction of data beyond the scope of recovery. You can use the software to wipe every bit of data on the laptop’s hard drive. The software implements International Standards for drive sanitization and generates audit-trail reports and certificates of erasure.
About The Author
Girish
Girish is a blogger and writer. He has over 6 years of experience in Data Recovery and Data Eraser technology. In his free time, he writes about technical tips and tutorials.