Online Observations

A lot of us don’t realize that when we surrender a computer to the IT department, sell our old hardware, or plain dispose hard disks, we send out private data that can be misused. Even those of us who are little more diligent about this will only do so much as erasing data or formatting the hard drive, which is not good enough if someone is determined to retrieve such data. For completely rendering the data unrecoverable something much better is needed.

That is where Darik’s Boot and Nuke comes in.

DBAN is a utility which basically nukes your hard drive so that no data on it is irrecoverable by any means. It comes as a self contained boot disk which will let you boot the computer from it and then will proceed to clear the hard drive. There are many reasons why you may want to do this. As mentioned earlier, if you are selling your computer, you want to wipe it to eliminate the threat of identity theft. Or you want a clean slate to re-install your OS and sometimes a simple format is not good enough. As per the creator of DBAN:

DBAN prevents or thoroughly hinders all known techniques of hard disk forensic analysis.

It’s certainly a useful tool to have around your toolkit.