Can you truly delete something from the digital universe?
What you do on the Internet – especially on social media – these days can get you fired. So to make sure that your online life doesn’t interfere with your worklife, I spoke to Roberto Caprio, managing director at Dial a Nerd, who gave me some nifty tips for covering your digital tracks….
When you work on a computer, you leave a lot of traces behind you. Whether you visit certain websites; check your e-mail; view and edit documents or photos, your computer records everything you do. How, you may ask?
- Your web browser saves the web pages you view,
- Your e-mail program saves copies of the e-mails you read, compose or send to others, and
- Your text or image-editing program keeps a list of files you’ve worked on recently.
So to begin with, understand what you’re trying to delete and why, and this will help you take the appropriate action.
- Normal ‘delete’ on a Windows PC won’t remove a file from the computer but will only show the space that was occupied by that file as free. This creates the possibility for new data to take over this space, but there is no guarantee of when this will happen - letting people recover the original data.
- When you format a drive, you’ll achieve a higher level of security but the data can still be recovered depending on how the drive was formatted. Once again, a quick format won’t remove the data from a hard drive but will simply remove the information where the data is stored, making it fairly difficult to find. However, there are techniques and software that will allow a tech-savvy user to recover the information partially or totally.
Rather be safe than sorry!
Always be extremely careful when you try different techniques to delete information from your computer as you risk also removing valuable data that you never intended to delete:
- There is a free program called Eraser that provides simple tools to remove files permanently from your computer.
- We recommend Zdelete - a reasonably priced, fully featured program (about US$ 30 - approximately R347) – that allows you to delete a host of information from your PC securely. It has a user-friendly interface and will allow you to delete, for example, your Internet history, temporary files, cookies and stored passwords.
Now, if you want to dispose of your old computer, remove the hard drive and destroy it - by physical means is probably the best option.
Finally, Apple’s most recent operating systems offer built-in features to delete information permanently – any technician at an iStore will be able to assist.
Happy deleting!
