How to Completely Wipe a USB Drive Before Selling for Safety?
Summary: Read this guide to learn how to completely wipe a USB Drive before selling it or for another reason.
A USB drive is a small, high-capacity mobile storage device that connects to a computer over the USB interface. It is lightweight, portable, and simple to use and carry. As with a hard disk, you may occasionally need to wipe a USB flash drive.
To completely empty a flash drive, some users may erase files or format the USB device. However, mere deleting or formatting will not totally erase files. Additionally, we shall explain this in depth below. Prior to that, let us consider why users are required to execute this work.
When is it Necessary to Wipe a USB Drive?
- Increase the amount of space available for storing fresh data. When you wipe a USB drive, all of the data on the device is wiped, and you may utilize all of the vacant space on the device.
- The material in drive is very sensitive and must be deleted forever.
- Before you sell a USB flash drive, make a secure wipe of all of the data on the device.
- Unknown virus or malware on a USB flash drive should be removed.
- Change the file system format, for example, from FAT32 to NTFS, or from NTFS to exFAT or Ext4 format.
Is it True That Formatting the USB Drive Permanently Removes All Data?
If you’re looking to just repair USB drive issues or corruption, formatting may be helpful. However, if you want to complete wipe important data from your USB drive before sending it to another person, selling it, or disposing of it, formatting is not the way to go.
Only the data on the USB drive is made unusable by formatting it, however there are a variety of data recovery program available that can restore data from a formatted USB drive. A bad individual can use such software to access your data, putting you in danger of being arrested or otherwise penalized.
Thus, deleting data or formatting the storage drive is not the safest way to permanently “wipe” data that can’t be recovered.
How to Completely Wipe a USB Drive?
We can see there are multiple tools are accessible on the internet for the purpose of wiping data. However, you must select one that is completely safe and secure to download. We’d recommend BitRecover BitWipe Wizard, one of the most popular file erasing software. It is a do-it-yourself application that effectively deletes current and erased data (deleted or formatted), including internet searches, history, system and application traces. We ensure you that this application will wipe your data from USB Drive completely in some moments. So, just download the software to completely wipe a USB Drive.
Have A Look at the Easy Steps to Wiping USB Drive Completely
Now, pick “files and folders” if you want to access specific files and folders; otherwise, select “Logical Drives.”
Following that, Select Wipe Options and and choose “Free Space” if you only want to eliminate free space on the drive, or “Total Space” if you want to wipe the drive completely.
Now, by clicking on the “Drives” option, pick the drives from which you wish to delete data. And then click the Next button to proceed.
Now that the tool window with chosen data has shown, choose the folders and files you desire to delete and click next.
Select “Filter Options” to delete certain files and apply the filter.
And now, from the drop-down menu, select the wipe technique that meets your requirements.
Press the erase button; a warning notice will display; click the yes symbol one more.
That’s it. How to completely wipe a USB Drive query has been resolved.
Let’s Come to the Conclusion
In this post, we’ve discussed why it’s critical to thoroughly wipe a USB flash drive. We have provided the greatest and easiest-to-use do it yourself program, which allows you to complete this work quickly and effortlessly. The recommended program enables users to thoroughly erase a USB Drive on Windows without encountering any difficulties. The user interface of this application is extremely user-friendly. This task is readily accomplished by both technically savvy and non-technically savvy users.