Securely erasing removable drives before disposal or resale makes sense. Secure erase 'writes over' the actual contents of your volume, not just the 'metadata' that describes them. While 'encrypt your data' is good advice, secure erase raises the difficulty of recovering sensitive data even further. Archival as effective as the physical security measures you employ. Data destruction is permanent but there's little resale value in shredded drive particles. If he feels the improperly disposed data are sufficiently valuable, he can try commercial or custom software to recover encrypted data. Several ways exist to protect these data: encryption, data destruction, archival, or secure erasure.Įncryption does protect data, but once you lose physical possession of a drive, time favors the criminal or attacker. Personal identifying or health data disclosure are too frequent outcomes of leaving our data on laptops or drives we lose, discard, or sell. In a companion post, How to Securely Erase Removable Media Using Mac OS X, I explain how physical loss, theft or improper disposal of laptops or removable drives is the most common data breach of electronic personal health information.

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