Don’t Just Throw Your PC in the Trash
The Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) and other various computer components are not good for the environment. When you’re ready to trash your old PC, check with your local sanitation department for rules and regulations regarding electronics disposal. Sometimes a disposal fee’s required, but there are many free options out there too.
Back-Up All of Your Personal Data
Before buying that shiny new computer and ditching your old one, ensure you get all of your data off the old one first. Use an external hard drive, a cloud backup like Dropbox or Google Drive, or writable DVDs to make a copy of your data. Check your backup to make sure it has everything you want on it before you move on.
Hold On to Your Hard Drive (or at Least Use a Disk Wipe Utility on Them)
Your computer’s hard drive holds vast amounts of personal data, from family photographs to bank records and everything in between. You don’t want some stranger getting a hold of this information. That’s why many people choose to take the hard drive out of a computer and keep it before trading or recycling the rest. Some people buy old computers strictly to extract personal information from the previous owner. Old hard drives are a treasure trove of information for would-be criminals, according to a 2007 study.
Is Formatting a Hard Drive Enough?
Even if you format and repartition a hard drive, residual data (on HDD or traditional moving-parts-hard drives) often remains and can be quickly recovered with forensic data recovery programs. It’s shocking how easy it is to bring back a deleted file using such a tool. Some can successfully resurrect a file they’ve deleted, even with the deleted file residing on a drive that the computer’s operating system reformatted. Sometimes, when you format a drive, you wipe out the file header and File Allocation Table (FAT) pointer record information. The actual data remains on the drive unless overwritten by other data or wiped with a specialized disk wipe utility that overwrites all the sectors on the drive with ones and zeros. It’s important to know that disk wipe utilities do a great job clearing out a drive with extreme prejudice. Still, it’s not outlandish to fear that some super genius will come up with a new data forensic technology someday that will read files from drives that you wiped even with the best tools out there. It may be a more paranoid take on personal privacy, but it’s something we should all know and keep in mind before selling or disposing of a computer. Many people choose to hold on to old hard drives instead of wiping them. They don’t take up that much room, and you can always use them for other projects, such as putting them in a USB drive caddy and moving data from one PC to another when a network is not available. If neither of these options sounds good, you can physically destroy the drive before recycling it. Punching a few holes in it with a power drill usually does the trick.
Make Sure to Eject All Your DVDs and Other Removable Media From Your Old Computer
People often leave a disk in their computer’s DVD drive for ages. You may leave your operating system DVD in your computer for weeks on end, or you may have left a backup copy of your files in the drive. Unless you want your computer’s next owner to have this disk, you should eject it and put it away for safekeeping. You should also check the computer’s back to ensure you don’t have a USB thumb drive connected to a USB port. Thumb drives are so small now that you hardly notice them.
