Situation 1: A highly placed executive resigns from a company to join another. Before that, he has to hand over his laptop. He deletes all the necessary information and formats the drive before handing it over. But the next employee who receives his laptop manages to recover most of what he had deleted and profits from access to his predecessor’s database.

Situation 2: The real life case of the school teacher who was convicted for running a child porn racket. He had deleted all evidence, or so he thought, from his computer. But forensics experts recovered even formatted data and found incriminatory evidence which proved that he had been sexually exploiting very young students, photographing them in compromising positions, and then circulating this on the net. He could then be brought to justice.

Situation 3: A security company regularly deletes the sensitive details of its clients after closing with their cases – and they carefully delete all the material. A determined hacker breaks into their system, figures out what they do, and recovers all the formatted material to use it for whatever nasty purpose he may have in mind. The company realises that things are going wrong somewhere only when enraged clients start calling them.

History of the Quick and Secure Format

It is obvious from the above examples that appearances can be very deceiving when it comes to formatting data. We may be caught completely unawares on the basis of what we thought had been taken care of by removing it permanently. Blackmail, exploitation, theft, terrorist activities – the possibilities offered to the cyber criminal are endless. In fact, it was a national security issue that started this research into wiping data completely and quickly. In 2001, an American spy plane collided with a Chinese fighter plane and was forced to land on an island in China. The crew tried to delete as much as they could of the heavy-duty data on board, but failed. The Chinese got hold of the security information and used it to their benefit. This set the American scientists thinking harder than before. Disks can be formatted, true, but how fast and how thoroughly? It takes hours of careful checking to ensure that a disk is really clean. The researchers tried to figure out how to do it in a few minutes and with complete security. It may sound hopeless, but data has been recovered from disks that have been crushed, chemically treated, or even fried in microwaves. The scientists developed, after years of hard work, a super powerful magnet that would penetrate the enclosures of the hard disc and obliterate all data by literally lifting them off the surface of the disc. The most powerful magnets are still very costly and cumbersome, but research is going on to streamline them farther.

Software Available

There are a lot of software packages available on the net (some of it even for free), for securely formatting a disk. As can be well understood, these companies cannot offer the terribly powerful devices mentioned above at their price. So they use the simple method of ‘shredding’ data to the extent where it would become impossible to retrieve it.

What Is Shredding?

The best way to get rid of data is to overwrite it. Shredding is the continuous overwriting of the given drive by random data till the original data is cut into such small pieces that it becomes unrecognisable. When a disk is formatted, the data is not really removed. The space it used to occupy on the disk is simply shown as available for writing other information, but the old data still exists somewhere on the drive, its address or the FAT file has merely changed. When we use a secure formatting software, it does exactly this kind of overwriting to make sure that the data is deleted.

Why Format?

Usually, we feel a twinge of apprehension at the word ‘format’. For the average home user, formatting is usually not required unless a virus has entered and infected the computer. But, there are many reasons why formatting can be a necessary activity sometimes.

1. If one is about to leave a company and has to hand over the computer to the employer.
2. If a computer is to be donated.
3. A computer seller or someone who wants to give a computer on rent would also need to format it.
4. If a virus enters the computer and infects it.

So the next time you want to really ensure that all you wanted to remove is really gone, you should use a software that will format the disk more thoroughly than just a simple DOS command.

James Walsh is a freelance writer and copy editor. For more information on Data Recovery see http://www.fields-data-recovery.co.uk