In our current era, data has become very important. There are hacking operations and cyber attacks that have managed to steal millions of dollars by accessing important data. Generally, every individual seeks to protect their data starting from personal information, moving on to photos and personal files, and not ending with passwords and payment cards, and unfortunately, many people make mistakes that may lead to leaking their data unintentionally.
One of the biggest mistakes is selling USB drives or other storage media without making some effort to delete the data from them. There are now many traditional and advanced methods available to recover data from various storage media, making personal data vulnerable to leakage. Some statistics in the United States indicate that two-thirds of used USB drives sold still contain private data belonging to their owners. In any case, let’s discuss everything related to the data on used USB drives and how you can completely delete it.
Risks of Selling Used USB Drives
In the past year, researchers from the University of Hertfordshire in the UK purchased 200 used USB drives through the eBay e-commerce website. The source of these drives was from the United States and Britain in order to study their condition and understand how users deal with drives and storage media before selling or disposing of them. This study indicated that two-thirds of the drives still contained a lot of important data for the users, including a wide range of personal files, nude photos, work documents, ID photos, receipts, medical documents, and other data.
Recently, the University of Abertay in Scotland published a report about used USB drives, discussing the risks of selling drives and storage devices containing important data on them. Researchers were able to recover more than 75,000 deleted files from used USB drives, even though this data had already been deleted from the drive. Among these data were extremely important files and highly sensitive information such as ID photos, passports, bank account details, passwords, tax declarations, and more.
The risks of selling used storage media, specifically USB drives, lie in the ease of file recovery, making user data vulnerable if it falls into unreliable hands. The threat may even extend to personal safety if the data is important and sensitive. You should know that simply deleting files from the drive is not enough, and even if you format the drive or storage media in general, there is still a high possibility to recover the files that were on it.
Read also: 4 Unique Uses You Must Know to Benefit from USB Flash Drives
Why Can Deleted Files Be Recovered?
Most users attempt to delete data from the used drive before selling it, either by deleting it from within the drive or by formatting it to delete all files and data on it. However, these files can be recovered later because popular operating systems like Windows do not immediately delete data from storage media. This helps improve performance to some extent, and thus the files remain in the storage space. The difference is that you can write over these files by adding new files to the storage space.
This method works with many storage media, especially older ones. However, the situation is slightly different for modern solid-state drives (SSDs) that support TRIM, as when you delete specific files on SSD drives, the files are deleted immediately and cannot be recovered at all, except through some complex methods (in some types of SSD) which may not be practical either.
Read also: How to Share USB Flash Drive Files Through a Router
What to Do to Get Rid of Files on Storage Media?
Experts advise against selling used USB drives and storage media, especially if they contain important data. Attempting to recover these files by buyers may lead you into unnecessary trouble, so it’s best to keep them with you, use them in some way, or even dispose of them by destroying them in the worst-case scenarios. If you intend to sell them, it is essential to perform a final data deletion process first to prevent them from being recovered again.
To do that, format the drive or completely erase the files from it. It’s also important to use a secure file deletion program, as these programs prevent any possibility of recovering files from the drive in the future. Some of the best free tools for this purpose are CCleaner, KillDisk, DiskGenius, and Partition Wizard. It’s also good to add large and unimportant files to the drive, then delete them again, repeating this process several times to prevent the previous files from being recovered permanently.
