 incl. Acronis Advantage PremierAcronis Advantage PremierAnnual subscription support and maintenance program. Offers access to 24 x 7 support services available via chat, email and phone.
Acronis Advantage Premier customers receive priority support: in the event of a business-critical system error, customers will receive the initial response within one hour. The first year of support service is included with the purchase of any Acronis corporate product. BCS February 12, 2009 Full text of original article at BCS web site
Wipe and goIn the current economic and social climate, individuals and businesses across the UK have the opportunity to reuse, recycle or donate older laptops and PCs in order to make the most of their existing resources and attempt to be more environmentally responsible.
But which ever option you choose, it is vital to remember that if you are disposing of a hard disk, or simply redeploying it as part of a new system, the disk drive needs to be fully wiped of existing data. The problem is that a PC (and therefore its hard drive) is an extension of its user. It holds and stores important personal or corporate documents, such as tax details, employee records, bank statements and CVs not to mention all the applications that have been installed, passwords that have been created and content that has been downloaded. If these details found their way into the wrong hands, it could spell disaster for the original owner. But cleaning the hard drive on any PC involves much more than simply emptying its contents into the computer's recycle or trash bin as erased data, even when deleted from the recycle bin, can be recovered if you have the knowledge and the appropriate software (both of which can be easily discovered on the web). In fact, using the operating system's delete command doesn't actually delete anything. It simply marks the space on the disk as available so the operating system can reuse it. This is fast, but it leaves all the data in place on the disk, so it is easy to recover. Disk disposal is, therefore, becoming a big issue to the extent that a recent report published by Which? Computing, concluded that the only way to stop fraudsters stealing information from old computer hard drives is to smash them up with a hammer. This is obviously an extreme solution and it's also very bad for the environment. However, in addition to the environmental implications of this, breaking up a hard drive in this way might not actually do what the user intended it to do, which is getting rid of the data. There are many companies that specialise in retrieving data from fire or flood damaged disks, so a broken one is not always going to guarantee 100 per cent that data will be unrecoverable. The report glosses over alternative solutions such as ultra effective disk cleansing solutions that are available to consumers and businesses some of which have been approved, and are used, by Fortune 500 companies around the world. Disk cleansing programmes work by actually writing random sequences over the data on a hard drive to make it unrecoverable. As with all software, there are different levels available depending on how much you want to spend. There's the basic level, which writes over all the sectors on the disk once making them unreadable by ordinary means. There are also more advanced solutions that write all sectors repeatedly with different bit patterns rendering the information completely unrecoverable. In fact, users can now select from multiple overwriting algorithms, including several used by the US and other Departments of Defence. The basic level of scrubbing only writes over the disk once. This makes it fast but it does mean that an expert hacker with the right software and enough patience may be able to recover at least some of the material on the disk. Multi-pass scrubbing makes it much less likely that anything readable will be left on the disk. Basically it comes down to common sense and evaluating the level of security you need. If the information on your drive disk is extremely sensitive such as customer details, credit card numbers or bank statements, then the added time it takes to use a multi-pass scrubbing technique is appropriate. If it's just your old iTunes library and a few shopping lists, you could probably use a single pass solution. Likewise, if you're going to dispose of the hard drive by donating it to a charity, selling it on eBay or just taking to the electrical disposal unit at your local tip, a multi-pass erase is highly recommended but if you're going to reuse the erased hard disk on a new PC of your own then basic cleansing software should be sufficient.
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