Why You Should Format or Permanently Delete Data on Your Laptop Computer before Selling It

Always ensure that you format or completely wipe off the data on your laptop computer, phone or USB flash drive before selling it. This might save you from a lot of trouble, embarrassment or legal action depending on which part of the world you are in. The story of a 25 year old American; Brian K. Rogers might make you want to have a rethink when you are selling your laptop computer, USB flash drive or phone. Brian sold his laptop to a pawn shop. The company while trying to restore the laptop to factory settings so that it could be resold discovered files (videos and images) of child pornography in the recycle bin of the laptop. In case you are not aware, it is an offence to knowingly possess child pornography in the US. The company contacted the police and upon investigation Brian’s desktop computer at home was searched and more child pornography files were discovered on the desktop. He was charged to court, tried, convicted and sentenced to 5 years imprisonment and also ordered to pay more than $3,000(about N480,000) in restitution to a victim in a video he downloaded. He was also sentenced to eight years of probation. Brian’s story can be found here  and here.

Now, only if Brian was careful enough to format his laptop before selling it to the pawn shop, his criminal activities won’t have been exposed. Brian been an American and in America where there is a high rate of computer literate persons you would expect that Brian would not take things like formatting his laptop before selling it for granted or he would know that it is crucially important for him to format his laptop before selling it. The implicating pornographic file was actually found in Brian’s recycle bin. It was that discovery that led to further discovery of implicating files on his home computer (desktop).

It is instructive to note that when you delete files from your computer they go to the recycle bin and even when you empty your recycle bin the contents of the file are not physically obliterated on your computer’s hard drive, but rather the file is simply flagged as deleted. More precisely, the space it occupies is marked as available for writing or saving new files. This means that the older the file, the less chance there is of successful recovery because it is more likely to have been overwritten by another newer file and this applies to your memory card or USB flash drive. However, with appropriate softwares (e.g. Recuva, Easus Data Recovery Wizard) the files could still be recovered if they have not been overwritten by new files.

In other words files that are deleted on your laptop or when you empty your recycle bin or format your laptop are not really deleted or permanently erased, it is only the links to where the files are located on your laptop or memory card or flash drive that are removed and despite allowing you to use the space for other files again, the actual information is still lurking on your disk space therefore even when you format your laptop files could still be recovered by an adept computer user using recovery softwares.

However to delete files and render them unrecoverable you try using such softwares like File Shredder which erases files permanently so it cannot be recovered and is part of Glary Utilites which can be found here or CCleaner which provides a method to permanently remove any deleted data from your hard drive, memory card or USB flash drive. For more information on how to permanently delete or erase data on your computer read this article.