So you want to get rid of your computer. To keep your data secure — whether it’s financial records, business information, or anything else private that you don’t want people snooping through — you’ll want to securely wipe the hard drive. This ensures that no one can recover the deleted files. However, you don’t want to wipe the operating system itself — you want to provide a fresh operating system so the computer’s new owner can use it.
Just re-installing your operating system or restoring from your recovery partition isn’t enough to guarantee that your files won’t be recoverable. When getting rid of a PC that has potentially sensitive data, you should wipe the drive to be sure your data can’t be recovered.
