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Introduction |
| Data destruction on hard drives is comparatively easy, either by overwriting, though this may take a long time, or more securely by physical destruction. However, with solid state disks (SSDs) and memory sticks, physical destruction is the only safe method. This is because data is not written to fixed locations as on a hard disk, but is stored in whichever are currently the least used memory cells. This is so as to spread out the wear caused by every write operation - something that doesn’t happen with hard disks. As a result, old copies of data are likely to persist in memory cells that you can’t directly access, except with forensic tools. | | | The smart thing to do is to enable encryption before you write any sensitive data, then all you have to do is change the key or unlock code to something totally random and destroy any record of it, and no one will be able to recover your data. On Windows, you can use Bitlocker, or FileVault on Macs. You can use either of those on memory sticks, or Veracrypt, which also works on Linux. You should ''always'' encrypt your memory sticks as they are so easily lost. | | If you were looking to destroy data on a hard disk, take a look at my companion guide here https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/How+to+safely+and+securely+destroy+hard+disk+data/[guide|140673] |
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