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.
