7. How can I wipe data off my hard drive? When you delete a file on your computer, the computer doesn't really erase it from the hard drive. All it does is remove a few bytes of information from the file that's there to keep it from being written over by

7. How can I wipe data off my hard drive?

When you delete a file on your computer, the computer doesn't really erase it from the hard drive. All it does is remove a few bytes of information from the file that's there to keep it from being written over by another program. In fact, if you accidentally erase a program from your computer by emptying the trash icon, you can use one of many different kinds of utilities to recover the file. Even formatting a disk drive won't get rid of the data. All the information will remain on the drive.

As an experiment for an article he was writing, a journalist friend bought a dozen used hard drives for sale at a second-hand computer store. These drives were all pulled from used personal computers. When my friend attached them to his computer and fired them up, he was surprised to discover that their former owners hadn't erased some of the drives. And even the drives that had been erased were still full of easily recoverable data. In the interest of science, he undeleted the contents of the drives, discovering a wealth of financial data, personal correspondence, and a huge amount of pornography. In the hands of an unscrupulous person, this information could have been used for blackmailing their former owners or worse. Fortunately, my friend is the honest sort, and after filing his article he did to the drives what their former owners should have done before they sold them: he scrubbed the data.

Data scrubbing involves not only erasing the files, but also writing over them with ones and zeros so that the magnetic particles that store the information lose all record of what they once held.

It's not hard to scrub an entire disk (or even just a selected file or folder than you don't ever want anyone to see, including yourself, ever again). On the Macintosh, you can use the built-in Disk Utility program to securely delete a disk. First, you need to boot up using a drive other than the one you want to zap. Your OS X install disk will work. Just stick the CD into the slot and restart the computer with the C key pressed. Then open "Disk Utility" from the "Go" menu and select the disk drive to be erased. From there, click the "Erase‚" button and then "Security Options" near the bottom of the window. If you select the Defense Department Standard, you can be assured that no one will ever be able to undelete the files on your hard drive.

Windows users can download a copy of Darik's Boot and Nuke. Copy the program to a CD, then boot your computer with it to "nuke" everything on the hard drive.

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8. How can I save a website before they can take it down and destroy the evidence?

There are several ways to save Web pages before they go up in smoke like the tape in the beginning of the old Mission: Impossible TV show. The first is to simply save the page as a text file. In Firefox, select "Save Page As" from the File menu and choose "Text Files" in the format pull-down menu. You can also choose to save it as a "Web page, complete‚" that will be stored on your hard drive with images and formatting intact. When you save a Web page this way, a folder is created on your hard drive with all the files needed to render the Web page just as it first appeared in your browser. Mac users also have the option of saving a Web page as a standalone PDF file that can be viewed with Adobe Reader or Apple's Preview utility.

These methods are fine ways to archive websites you don't want to lose access to, but if you are serious about saving Web pages, go to furl.net and sign up for a free account. Then drag the Furl bookmarklet (the name for a small application that can be saved as a bookmark on your Web browser) into your Bookmarks Toolbar menu. Afterward, when you visit a website and find a page that you want to save, click the Furl bookmarklet and fill out as much information as you wish in the pop-up window. You can give the page a rating, a topic of your own choosing, keywords, comments, and a clipping from the text of the site. When you click Save, the page will be saved to your Furl archive.

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