Securely erasing a hard-drive

Before throwing away your drives, always ensure that personal data (including students works, list of seminar attendance, student grading — see the Data protection officer guides) are not stored there. Ideally, always completly erase the drives. However, common erasing and/or formatting the drive is usually not sufficient).

For securely erasing drives, the freely available program Darik's Boot And Nuke (DBAN) can be used. To use it, the steps are as follows:

1. Download the ISO file dban-2.3.0_i586.iso and use the program rufus to create the bootable USB.
2. Boot your computer (which contains the drive you want to securely erase) from the created USB.
3. From the displayed menu, select an apropriate erasing option.

A detailed documentation of DBAN can be found here.