Before Selling or Recycling Your Computer Do Zero Fill Formatting, Or Else!

Biz Tech Tips, episode 22. Video Archive.

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When recycling or selling your computers, do this or you are at risk: zero fill formatting

What happens when deleting a file?

Files are 1s and 0s, with a "pointer" to which specific 1s and 0s are which files.

When deleted (even when the recycle bin is emptied) that just removes the pointers, and the computer marks that area as available to write on, but it doesn't make it impossible to recover.

Files can be recovered by manually figuring out where 1s and 0s started and stopped and what that is associated with. So long as the computer didn't start writing new files in those spaces, that means an expert might be able to retrieve it.

Why is that bad?

If you're getting rid of a computer, even if you reformatted, that's not a guarantee that those 1s and 0s have been fully removed. This means your information and sensitive data could potentially still be recovered when you sell/recycle/trash your computer.

What to do about it?

Zero-fill formatting is where the computer goes in and fills 0s in for every bit of available space.

That means no information is recoverable, and also means you can sell it used, or recycle it, without worry. There's no way to tell which 0s used to be 1s, so it's like staring at a blank page.

How do you do it?

Google "Zero Fill Formatting" for your OS

If you're selling your computer, make sure to provide the formatting disk though, otherwise the computer is useless and they'll have to buy a new operating system disk themselves.