Personal computer hard drives can contain personal information such as bank account numbers, medical records, social security numbers, credit card numbers, family names, personal and professional contact information, as well as other personal information.
Business and/or corporate hard drives can contain proprietary, patient, customer, credit information as well as intellectual property. If put in the wrong hands, companies are held liable if the data is used for fraudulent or illegal activities.
Simply formatting a hard drive cannot remove the data contained on it. When a hard drive is formatted or a file is deleted, it is still possible to recover information. With most operating systems, files that are deleted are not really “deleted”. In most cases, the only thing “deleted” is the index tab pointing to the file, enabling the discovery of confidential data. When getting rid of an old computer making sure all the data is gone forever can be tricky, as not all methods of hard drive destruction are effective. PCI has the computer forensic expertise to know what methods work for permanently erasing data. We provide a quick and affordable service to our clients; sanitizing, or cleaning, old hard drives in preparation for donation, sale, recycling, or being put in the trash. This permanently erases sensitive data on a hard drive, using special hardware. This is accomplished by overwriting all of the data on the hard drive. Utilizing this method results in the data being un-recoverable, leaving a confident feeling that sensitive information is completely destroyed. We verify that all data is erased and issue a Certificate of Destruction for all sanitized hard drives.
We meet the U.S. Department of Defense standards (DOD 5220.22-M) of sanitizing hard drives.
PCI offers the convenience of completing the work on-site at your home or business.
Note: Precision Computer Investigations, LLC can backup data for an additional fee.