Autoclave

Have you ever bought a used computer, possibly at a failed dot-com auction or Boeing Surplus? Ever taken a look at what`s on the hard drive? When the last dotcom I worked for went out of business, all the computers were auctioned off. I heard a few weeks after the auction that a bartender had been asking one of my former co-workers about the Details of another co-worker`s LOVE life, details he picked up from reading the personal email which had been left on a computer sold at the auction. One of my current co-workers says that whenever he buys a used computer he pokes around on the hard drive to see what`s left over. Given how many dotcoms are going out of business these days, I`m sure there are plenty of hard drives out there with interesting data. So, let`s say you want to sell your old computer, but you don`t want folks reading all your old email or getting your bank account number. What do you do? Reformat the drive? It took me less than a minute of searching google to find a Company which sells a utility specifically for recovering data from drives which have been reformatted, hit by viruses, and whatnot. Maybe you already know about such utilities, and you`ve gone to the trouble of filling your entire hard drive with zeros. That`ll take care of the commercial recovery utilities. But according to this paper someone with a few thousand dollars and the know-how could recover your data even from that. (Keep in Mind that this is theoretical. Nobody seems to know even a friend of a friend who`s actually been able to recover data from a zeroed drive. Although it`s unlikely the NSA or the Mafia would admit that they could.)