Considering to sell your hard disk? IT nerds can recover your data!
Last week I got interested in the fact is a second hand hard disk could be restored with software like EaseUS what I mentioned before in my blog. I decided to search on the internet for the cheapest SATA disk I could find, an external HDD seemd like a perfect candidate for a recovery attempt.
While searching on the Dutch website Marktplaats I found an advertisement from a local computer store somewhere in the Netherlands like you can see below. I decided to order the hard disk and a few days later I received my first hard disk.
First simple steps
After unpacking the disk I attached it to my laptop by a sata docking station and opened the file explorer where the hard disk seems perfectly clean and formatted. I started to hesitate if the hard disk really contained data that I was able to recover, will it be that simple? Couldn’t be!
Another test I performed was to enable the Windows Explorer setting to show all the hidden files but also that didn’t enable me to see some hidden and forgotten data so I decided to start recovery software, in this case EaseUS.
*EaseUS is software I used before in my blogs, I am not promoting EaseUS but it’s the only software I am using at the moment because I bought a license key for it.
Lets use specialized software to recover some data!
So now it’s time for the hard work (for my laptop in common). I started EaseUS and began the recovery task and shockingly enough within a few seconds it was able to found the old data structure and started counting the files it was indexing.
Pictures, documents, music, html history files, and so on. With a hard disk from the internet, a normal Windows 10 laptop, a sata dockingstation and some data recovery software it seems to be possible for every non-highly educated computer user to extract data from a hard disk. This isn’t something I did realise in the past and possibly a lot of people like me but restoring private data and personal information of people who want to earn a few Euros from their old computer stuff like a hard disk is shockingly easy.
So…
You may thing, why should you do this? Well, there isn’t a main reason for that, you won’t become a better person by extracting personal data from old hard disks but the fact that a lonely person in his one person appartment could extract your data and do with it what he of she wants isn’t the nicest idea right? People assume that their data is safe and in good hands and assume also that computer stores who are selling their second hand hard disk will perform a data whipe they could trust.
Plans for selling your old laptop of your old external hard disk that you bought 10 years ago? Just perform a REAL data whipe.
