Imagine you want to sell your old PC. Of course, you do not want to give away your data, so you go and format your hard drive via Windows…

Well, you should be aware of the fact that formatting the hard drive this way just erases the content table (i.e. the location where the information is stored on the hard drive), but not the actual content. It is possible to restore the old content with the right tools.

What you should do is use a shredder tool which overwrites the content several times with meaningless data - just like the freeware “Eraser” does, for example.

• “Eraser” for Windows:
  www.heidi.ie/eraser/