Dumped hard drives tell all

When discarding a hard disk drive, users in most cases don't bother with properly wiping the data stored on the disk. Germany's O&O Software in a study (download PDF) found that 113 of 200 drives it purchased on eBay still contained data, which in some cases appeared to be confidential or personal data.

By running data recovery software on the drives, O&O uncovered all sorts of information belonging to the previous owners, including documents, e-mail and pictures, some explicit and very private. One drive, so it appears, was used by a German government body. It contained information related to an ongoing external investigation, according to O&O.

O&O, which not coincidentally sells tools for restoring and erasing data, did a similar study a year ago. The results were pretty much the same then. News.com's Matt Hines covered the issue in a recent story aptly titled: Skeletons on your hard drive.

Users should realize that dragging files to the recycle bin in Windows and then emptying the bin doesn't actually wipe them. The files can still be recovered. Free tools exist to wipe a hard disk drive, in addition to for-pay tools such as O&O's products. (Check Download.com for the free tools.)