Responsible Destruction of Sensitive Documents and Computer Files

By Mark Nolan


All businesses have information that must be kept private at all costs, like personal data, inside trade secrets, national information, financial records, etc.

Information like this occasionally must be permanently erased. This is because it may be taking up space, causing a mess, or maybe even because of industry law. But remember that the data must be discarded securely due to its sensitive nature. You must ensure that the information never leaves your possession, even when it's going into the rubbish.

It's really a piece of cake to get rid of information that's in paper form, just by shredding it. This is the most straight forward and common method for the eradication of privileged documents. You can use a strip-cut shredder which will slice the pages up into long, thin strips, or other types of shredders, such as micro-cut and cross-cut shredders which will destroy the pages even more securely.

Sometimes you want complete peace of mind for the protection of privacy regarding this information. Instead of shredding it on your own, try burning it instead, in a proper and safe place of course, leaving virtually no trace whatsoever. If you can afford it, hire a professional document removal firm who can take care of the secure document disposal for you. This is useful if you have a high volume of paper files you need disposed of on a regular basis.

Most likely you might also have contents on your computer that you don't want being seen by prying eyes. If you decide to get rid of something, beware of this common pitfall: simply permanently deleting it, even from the recycle bin, won't necessarily get rid of it for good. Many people don't realize that there are professionals who can still recover the data from traces that will still be there. You can still manage to eliminate these records anyway by using more conclusive means.

There are various different ways in which you can go about this. In order to eliminate all the files conclusively, you can physically destroy the hard drive and/or damage it until its content can never be seen again, or electronically cleanse it with a digital shredder, or even both.

In order to physically destroy the privileged information that may still reside on drives and CDs, you can smash them apart, scuff their surfaces, and make holes in important locations on the drive tracks themselves. More holes are always better than less holes. Make sure that no professional will ever be able to recover what secrets were once there. Make it so they would have to be crazy to even try.

For devices like computer hard drives, memory sticks, storage cards and the like, digital shredders are a handy tool for completely clearing them. Offices which frequently have these items to "shred" ought to have such a digital shredder on hand. It can easily destroy computer files forever by breaking apart the internal structure and wrecking the magnetic parts on the devices where they reside, in order to make sure that all your sensitive information is duly protected.




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