Many people have noticed a sharp spike in identity theft over the past couple of years and are worried about their personal information. A large portion of the information gathered for identity theft comes from unsecured and discarded computers. Using data cleansing tools can prevent identity theft, at least from leftover information on your old machine. Believe it or not, just because you delete something it is not gone from your system.
When you delete an item in your system in most cases it goes to the recycle bin. From there you can either restore it, or delete it. Deleting it gives you the impression that it's gone for good but this is not the case. In most cases when you delete an item the actual bulk of the item may be gone, but a rough outline of what it is, and key data fragments are still stored. These leftovers can be retrieved by data recovery tools and the information fully restored and used for anything.
This is why data cleaning tools have become so popular amongst standard computer users. These tools range from simple cleaners that you run from inside your operating system to get rid of the data. To complex cleaners that you boot from a disc that completely wipe your hard disk of all information. The later can take several hours to several days depending on the level of cleaning that you want.
This task is accomplished by writing 0s and 1s to the drive and overwriting all information previously stored on it. The more overwrites you have the less chance there is of anything being recovered. This is the same technique that the tools that can be run from within the operating systems use to delete file fragments. They take the area that the file is in, delete the file, and then overwrite that space with 1s and 0s.
However as data cleaning tools advance so do data recovery tools. New techniques are constantly being developed to take care of leftover file fragments and full files. These methods may range from simple maintenance to complete operating system destruction. The latter of these is used when you really don't want people looking at the stuff on your drive. This is mostly used by the military and government offices.
You can also consider registry cleaners as a type of data cleaning tool. They look through your registry for invalid references, and broken links and take care of them. Although not direct cleaning they can get rid of references to former programs. Right now the primary types of data cleaning tools in simple terms are cleaners, wipers, and destroyers. Cleaners are the ones run from inside the operating system and take care of files and fragments.
Wipers are the ones you have to boot from CD or DVD and they completely erase your drive. There's nothing left to recover, all a person will see is repeating 1's and 0's. This is an effective solution to preventing identity theft if you are giving away, or just getting rid of your machine. Destroyers completely erase the drive but also make it unusable thereby rendering it inaccessible, this is when you have to be sure no one will see what's on it.
Data Ladder is a software development and service company dedicated to helping you "Get the Most Out of Your Data" through Data Matching, Profiling, and Enrichment with its
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