Week 6: Clear Storage Disposal

The proper disposal of computer storage is a crucial part of any organization such as a school, business, bank, or hospital. These organizations could and probably would have extremely confidential data stored on its old computer drives. For example a bank or business may have important financial data about its clients on old storage. A school may have social security numbers of its students stored on old drives. If these organizations accidentally leaked out any information of this kind it could face hefty fines, bad press, or may even face being sued.

To protect itself from leaking out confidential information about its clients these organizations must do more than just dispose of old computer drives into the garbage. If the old drive just simply has useless information on it but is still functional you can write over the old data with a 3-pass overwrite. On the other hand if you have a broken drive and you want to trash it altogether then you can degauss it. Degaussing is making a magnetic storage media useless by using an electromagnet to rearrange the storage media's magnetic domain in random directions. If you are trying to dispose of a floppy disk, cd, or dvd then you could purchase a machine that shreds these types of storage media into many pieces, but if all else fails could just incinerate any type of storage.