Learn How to Protect Sensitive Information on Your Hard Drive


Occasionally, every one of us faces problems with our hard drive ' it either gets corrupted and we are unable to read or retrieve all our files and folders. Or perhaps the storage space proves inadequate and we consider replacing our old hard disk with a new NTFS hard drive with plenty of storage space. But then what about all the personal and financial information that is stored in your computer? Not to worry, you may say. After all, you have deleted all those files from your computer. In fact, some of the smart ones may even say that they have completely emptied the Recycle Bin. Nobody can get to this information now, correct? Wrong! Despite permanently erasing these files, one can easily carry out an NTFS undelete on the hard drive and actually recover all your valuable information.

 

If you are complete puzzled and perhaps a little shocked to hear this, let us first look at what really happens when we delete a file. When a file is deleted, the contents of that file are not actually removed from the NTFS hard drive. The computer contains information that lets it know what the file location is and when we delete the file, it changes this information to point to the Recycle Bin. When we empty the Recycle Bin, this pointer indicates that the file does not exist, that there is now empty space at that location and fresh data can be placed there. However, the contents of the old file still remain on the hard drive and using sophisticated recovery tools, anyone can perform an NTFS undelete to restore quite a few of the deleted files. It is therefore very important that when you are getting rid of your old hard drive, you use a secure data removal tool to completely shred all the data on your hard drive so that even the most sophisticated of recovery tools will not be able to get to your valuable information.

 

However, recovery tools can also be extremely helpful at times in actually protecting sensitive information. Suppose you have deleted a very important financial document by mistake ' a document that you need very urgently. Rather than waste time trying to see how you can get another copy of it, use a tool such as Advanced NTFS Undelete to carry out a quick NTFS undelete job on your hard drive. This program makes the job of recovering and restoring deleted files very simple. Not only that, you have complete control over which files to look for and which ones to restore. Thus, with Advanced NTFS Undelete you can be sure that your sensitive information stays safe.