You always feel good when you can take old computers, external drives or other devices and donate them to Goodwill, a school, or a charitable organization. Someone is sure to benefit from these items, you say to yourself, and you're right. But if those devices still have your company's sensitive data on them, you may be giving away a lot more than you know. And you can't just delete that data, either -- you have to scrub it off of the drive.

Why can't you just delete the files? Because deleting them doesn't actually get rid of them, at least not right then and there. The files simply becomes invisible to the user, and their ones and zeroes are considered fair game for being overwritten by fresh data at some point in the future. If that point never arrives, you could have a ton of top-secret info still sitting on the computer drive, just waiting for someone with a little know-how to undelete it.

Fortunately, you can always call Gravity Systems to get those drives scrubbed clean. We perform a multi-pass wipe that conforms to Department of Defense standards, writing over the data so many times that no one's going to retrieve it. Our clients trust us to wipe the drives clean as soon as we take them into custody. As you can imagine, we end up with a huge stack of scrubbed drives before too long, and every so often we bundle up the latest pile and take it over to the local Goodwill. Goodwill takes all the components out and sells them to overseas manufacturers, which helps support the Goodwill cause. They also make sure that toxic or otherwise non-recyclable materials get disposed of safely. So you can feel good about donating those drives -- just give them to us first!