Wipe your devices

WIPE ALL YOUR DEVICES

Don’t discard your devices without securely erasing their data first. Barry Collins reveals how to wipe a wide range of tech

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G iven that Windows 10 is nearing the end, many people will be preparing to retire a PC over the next few months. But before you pull the plug on that PC for the last time, you need to ensure you’ve erased any sensitive data – and that requires more effort than simply running through the Reset procedure.

Of course, it’s not only Windows 10 PCs that are being decommissioned. So, here we’re going to run you through how to ensure all the devices we use regularly are properly wiped before we send them on to their next destination – whether that be a friend or relative, a buyer or even straight to the recycling centre. You can’t be too careful, even with a device that’s destined for the crusher.

WINDOWS PCs

If you’re disposing of a Windows 10/11 PC, you’ll certainly want to clear off all your personal files first. And you might well be tempted by the Reset PC facility, which offers you the option to “remove everything” including “all of your personal files, apps and settings”.

However, only when you delve into the Microsoft support pages for the Reset PC feature (tinyurl. com/374resetpc) does a rather ominous warning appear: “The data erasure functionality is targeted at consumers and does not meet government and industry data erasure standards,” it warns.

Even more unhelpfully, it doesn’t explain precisely what it does when “removing everything”. Does it just delete the files? Does it write over them? We’re really none the wiser. That is until you click two screens further through the Reset PC wizard and select the Change Settings link. Now you’ll find an option to Clean Data, which reveals the default is to simply remove your files.

Microsoft still doesn’t really explain what Clean Data actually does, but the help page recommends that you use this option if you’re “planning to donate, recycle, or sell your PC”.

“This might take some time,” it adds, “but it makes it harder for other people to recover files you’ve removed.”

Again, not particularly revealing. Certainly less helpful than this video from IT professional Jason Bagnell (tinyurl.com/374youtube), which shows him resetting a PC with the “Clean Data” option ticked and then trying to recover files from that PC using the well-known Recuva utility. It can’t find anything other than Windows operating system files. For good measure, he uses a Hex editor to examine the raw data on the drive and discovers it was written over with random data.