

The fact is that the drive has to be completely overwritten before your old data is securely destroyed, a process known as a disk wipe or a hard wipe. And this can even apply if you’ve emptied your computer’s recycle bin, because there are a variety of utilities out there for recovering deleted data.īefore you start enjoying your new laptop, do a hard wipe of your old one This means deleted data can still be restored – a feature we appreciate in other circumstances, like when we accidently erase that report that’s due tomorrow. Even if you conscientiously deleted all your files, operating systems often don’t completely wipe away the data instead, files are kept on the disk until they are overwritten with new data, even if you can’t see them.
