Do you happen to have an old device and looking to upgrade? Maybe you already have a bunch of old electronic equipment and are looking at how to dispose of it properly. You came to the right place. We’re going to be learning how to securely dispose of your old electronic devices.
Erasing Data Before Disposal
Before you delete any data from your device make sure you have it backed up somewhere. If you want to permanently delete the data and not have any copies of it then forget the former. There are three main ways to delete data from the storage drive of your device such as deleting the data, overwriting the data, and destroying the storage drive.
- If you simply want to delete the data you can simply perform a factory reset/wipe on your device and it will erase all of the data on that device. A forewarning though, although you deleted all the data on the device and can see that it is deleted. It can still be recovered and is not the most secure way of verifying that all your data on a device is truly destroyed.
- A more effective way of deleting your data is to overwrite entirely the existing data or just the deleted data. When you overwrite completely new data on a storage device, the old data is no longer accessible and the device can then be disposed of properly or donated with no worries.
- If you simply want to dispose of the storage device you can physically destroy it as well. There is a spinning disk inside a hard disk drive (HDD) and you need to puncture that disk to destroy the data on the storage device and make sure it cannot be accessed. A solid-state drive (SSD) is one big storage device and can simply be punctured as well to have the same effect.
Disposing of the Device
My recommendation if you are wanting to dispose of the product and no longer want any use of it is to overwrite the memory and then destroy it after. This allows for redundancy purposes in case any malicious person attempts to try and piece the information on the drive back together. If you simply want to donate or sell the device then I recommend simply overwriting the data and you will be ready to get rid of the device. If you simply want to recycle the equipment then I recommend you to look up your local guidelines on electronic disposal or follow the EPA’s guidelines.
https://www.epa.gov/recycle/electronics-donation-and-recycling
