How To Wipe a Computer of All Your Personal Data. Whether you’re selling it, trashing it, or reusing it, that old computer of yours has a bunch of extremely private data stored inside.

And there’s a good chance that tossing files in the recycling bin and hitting factory reset won’t protect you. If a hacker finds the pattern your computer used to move those 0s and 1s around, they can reverse engineer the original state of your computer and pull out the goods.

This guide will take you through how to factory reset your computer or take a step beyond that by hiring a professional company to ensure your data has been destroyed (or smash up the computer yourself).

What Is a Factory Reset?

A factory reset will definitely make it impossible for you to practically access programs or files on your computer. It’s the nature of a factory reset: deleting anything that wasn’t on the device after it came out of production.

It’s important to know what a factory reset actually does, though. It puts all applications back into their original state and removes anything that wasn’t there when the computer left the factory. That means user data from the applications will also be deleted. However, that data will still live on the hard drive.

Factory resets are simple because they’re programs included on the computer when you first get your hands on it. It’s useful to reset errors with an operating system or helping restore the computer’s functionality or speed.

There are limitations, though. Factory resets leave data in the hard drive, so those pieces will live on until your hard drive is overwritten with new data. In short, the reset can give you a false sense of security. A complete erasure would actually look more like degaussing, or destroying the magnetic field around a hard drive to destroy its data, or actually smashing up the hard drive to bits.

Context is still key. If you’re an everyday user that only really played games or finished school work on your computer, there’s probably little risk in using a factory reset as your primary form of data wiping.

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