So you can safely erase any USB memory or hard drive

 Now we live in an increasingly digital world, and this is also evident in our customs. Not long ago, we had the vast majority of our photographs and documentation on paper. Today, many of the things we use on a daily basis are stored on a USB stick, external or internal hard drive. This is why we often choose this format because it is easy to transport. 

Sometimes what we store on this USB drive or hard drive is worthless, but in other cases, we have confidential documentation, photographs, or personal information that we do not want to disclose. The problem is that even if they are deleted, they can sometimes be restored. In this tutorial, we are going to explain how to safely erase a USB drive or hard drive to permanently erase its data.

The first thing we are going to find out is why we should safely erase our USB drives and what are the consequences of not being able to. Then we will see how we can erase a USB stick natively in Windows using two different commands. Finally, we will show you a third-party software in case you prefer to go without commands and have maximum security since it performs several random writes on the USB memory or hard disk in order to "shred" all the data that were previously found...

Why should we safely erase data from a USB stick or hard drive

When we delete a file, it is not completely deleted. If you use the right tools, it's not difficult to restore them if it wasn't that long ago. The main condition for you to have a better chance of a successful recovery is the absence of new files in this area. For this reason, when this happens, the best we can do is use this USB memory as little as possible until we start to recover data.

In this sense, if someone outside of us recovers this information, it could jeopardize both our privacy and security.

 

As for the reasons why you should safely erase USB memory, we have:

 

Deleting data or even formatting a USB drive does not guarantee complete erasure of the information it contains. However, as we will see later, formatting with special options can also be useful, while options such as "quick format" are not.

Anything that we do not erase in a reliable or permanent way can be recovered. Therefore, if it is a USB drive that we take with us to many places, it is convenient for important information to be encrypted and password protected. Otherwise, this information may be retrieved or used, which would compromise our security.

As for when it is convenient to safely remove the USB drive, we will have:

 

When are we going to give it away?

When are we going to break using it because we bought a faster or more capacious one.

We plan to sell.

We want to destroy the data they contain for greater security.

The definitive way to prevent any data from being recovered is to physically destroy that memory. However, as we will see below, there are various special tools that allow us to permanently delete data, preventing it from falling into the wrong hands. 

Their way of working is usually to overwrite random data multiple times over the data in the storage to make recovery impossible or very difficult. Now it's time to see what we can do with the native Windows tools.

All secure erase methods on USB sticks or discs

Currently, we have several methods to perform a secure erase on USB sticks or directly on hard drives or SSDs. This secure erase will allow us not only to erase the current data but also to overwrite all the information in the vault so that it is very difficult or almost impossible to proceed with data recovery using forensic software.

 

Here's how you can do this directly from Windows with tools that are installed by default, as well as other third-party programs that are specifically geared toward secure erase so you can choose which method each. choose.

 

Encryption, Windows command for secure erase

Thanks to the Cipher command, which is one of the tools included by default in Windows, we will be able to work with certificates and data encryption from a command prompt window. Among the various functionalities that this equipment offers us, without a doubt one of the most interesting is the secure erasure of the USB memory. Therefore, after using it, the data stored in it cannot be recovered even with forensic tools.

 

If we want to use Cipher, the first step we have to take is to go to the Windows Start menu and write a command line there. Then before clicking on the application, you need to click on Run as administrator.