Question

A company is retiring a batch of old magnetic hard drives that stored sensitive financial records. The drives will be sent to an off-site recycling vendor, and management wants to ensure the data cannot be recovered before the drives leave the building. Which method most reliably renders the data on these magnetic drives unrecoverable?

Accepted Answer

Degaussing each drive to disrupt its magnetic fields

Answer

Deleting all files and emptying the recycle bin on each drive

Answer

Reformatting each drive with a standard quick format

Answer

Renaming and encrypting the folders that contain the records