At Hungry Shredder, we often bang on about how important it is for you to shred your old paperwork. It’s a massive security thing, as well as being good for the environment and your business. But how much thought have you given to the other things in your business that contain critical, sensitive data? Things like USB sticks, archive boxes, or old hard drives. In this post, we explain why you should shred your old hard drives. If you want to know how to remove the hard drive ready for shredding, go back and read this post.
Data Responsibility
The absolute bottom line reason for shredding your old hard drives comes down to our old favourite – the Data Protection Act. As a business, it is your legal responsibility to ensure any data you hold on a client, supplier or any other individual or business is stored, handled and disposed of correctly. And while you may have processes in place to protect the data while it is in use, many businesses aren’t sure what to do with it when it’s no longer useful. But unlike paperwork, it’s very difficult to just shred a single file on your hard drive. Instead, Businesses should wait until their machines are being upgraded, and use that opportunity to destroy any residual data that hasn’t been wiped from the hard drives them. All they have to do is remove the hard drive itself and have that shredded – then the shell of the computer can be sold on without the risk of selling data too.
Data Is Never Really Deleted
Did you know that a single hard drive can You contain hundreds of thousands of files? You might not think it by looking at your high level file library, but most of that volume is taken up by all of the files you think you have deleted. see, it’s very, very difficult to permanently delete data from a hard drive. Even with expert scrubbing software, some traces of the file data can be left behind, and this is sometimes enough for data thieves to harvest and use. So all of your old emails, stored passwords, documents, signatures – every file you have ever created, opened or deleted is still there in some form. The only way to really fully delete it from existence is to destroy the device it is saved to – AKA the hard drive.
Understanding Hard Drive Shredding
There are a number of ways you can ‘delete’ data from a hard drive. You could buy some pricey data wipe software online, hit the casing really hard with a hammer or put it next to an industrial magnet (all of which are real solutions posed by the citizens of the internet on a cursory Google search, by the way). But the only way you will know that you data is gone is when the hard drive has been completely destroyed. This is most simply accomplished by shredding. Sadly, your loyal office shredder won’t be able to handle this one. Instead you need industrial grade machinery, capable of slicing through metal, cables, solder and computer chips as if they were butter. These shredders will split your hard drive up into miniscule pieces, which will then be separated, melted down and turned into new components. You’re definitely not getting anything back from that hard drive!
Luckily for you, the team at Hungry Shredder have one of these monster machines, waiting to chew up your old, discarded hard drives. The service is simple and cost effective, and can be used for 100 hard drives or just one, so you don’t need to keep them piling up until you have ‘the right amount’ Instead, bring them down to one of our shredding centres and watch our magnificent machine break it down and securely destroy your data for good. For more information, or to book your hard drive destruction session, get in touch with the team today.
