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Data Destruction

Data destruction is widely misunderstood and misrepresented. Many companies offer certificates of destruction to their customers. Such certificates can be considered weak assurances of what actually happens to data. From transport to final destruction, your hard drive can pass through a "chain of custody," leaving it vulnerable at any one point. It may even disappear overseas, only to end up in compromising places.

The best way to protect sensitive data is to wipe your own drive before it leaves your possession. File-deletion is not enough.

Please contact us if you would like to discuss high-volume on-site solutions.

At Free Geek we want to help folks make informed decisions. We don't make promises we can't keep, and we think having transparent practices helps prove our commitment to cultivating public trust. We take your privacy seriously and are committed to protecting it; ultimately, what happens to your data is your responsibility.

We have three categories of data destruction:

Hard Drives under 5GB

Physically Destroyed - Free Geek style!!

Broken Drive

Hard Drives over 5GB

Drive is sanitized out of orginial computer. Below is the custom machine our geeks built.

Drive Wipe

We sanitize drives with a view to the data wiping schemes of the following:

  • Canadian RCMP TSSIT OPS-II Standard Wipe

  • American DoD 5220-22.M Standard Wipe (Department of Defense)

  • Gutmann Wipe

  • PRNG Stream Wipe

 


Removable Media (e.g. floppy disks, tapes, CD-RW)

Physically Destroyed on request

Free Geek can provide Certificates of Data Destruction, but would like to remind people that certificates are not enough to protect you.

If any business promises complete and secure data destruction, we recommend you ask them some hard questions:

  • 1. When do you take responsibility for my equipment?
  • 2. How do you take responsibility for my equipment?
  • 3. How can you be 100% sure that no items get lost or stolen in transit?
  • 4. Do you have an incentive to notify me should items be lost or stolen?
  • 5. How can I verify the accuracy of serial numbers in your reports?
  • 6. How often have you reported losses and/or discrepancies?
  • 7. What happens when there is a loss?
  • 8. Who provides independant third-party verification that your process is secure?
If data privacy is of great concern to you, we suggest you wipe your own data using DBAN before it leaves your possession. DBAN is free and multi-platform, meaning that it can be used on most operating systems.