How to Permanently Erase Data from A Laptop?

“Hi, I am going to sell my Dell laptop. I have been using this laptop for 5 years...so many private documents and images are stored on this laptop. Is there any way to permanently erase these files from the laptop?” - Jill

If you own an old laptop and will sell it or donate it, you'd better permanently erase all your private data in this laptop. Whether you delete the files, empty the recycle bin or format the hard drive, the data is not lost forever. Most of us know how to recover deleted or formatted data from the laptop hard drive.

To solve this problem, we recommend "wiping" your laptop hard drives using data erasure software to permanently remove all your existing and deleted/lost data. If you don't know how to choose a data recovery program, just follow this guide.

1. Choose data erasure software for laptop erasure.

Disk cleaning software or data erasure software is able to permanently erase data from a laptop. Here, we choose the best data erasure software for you, it is Donemax Data Eraser. This powerful, safe and easy-to-use data erasure software is able to help you securely and permanently erase data from any type of hard drive or external storage device.

Donemax Data Eraser offers advanced data erasure algorithms, such as HMG Infosec Standard 5 (1 pass), Peter Gutmann's algorithm 2 (2 passes), U.S. Army AR380-19 (3 passes), DoD 5220.22-M ECE (7 passes), Peter Gutmann's algorithm 35 (35 passes). With this software, you can securely and permanently shred documents, wipe hard drive on your laptop. Once the data is erased by Donemax Data Eraser, the data will be gone forever, can't be recovered by any data recovery software.

2. Steps to permanently wipe data on laptop.

Some users may think that erasure will shorten the service life of the laptop hard drive, especially the SSD's life. Actually, Donemax Data Eraser will not cause any damage to your laptop or shorten the service life of the laptop hard drive. Just install it on your laptop, then run it to securely wipe data permanently from your laptop hard drive.

Step 1. Run Donemax Data Eraser on your laptop. Then you will see three data erasure modes: Erase Files, Erase Hard Drive and Erase Free Space.

Step 2. Choose a data erasure mode to help you erase data, Donemax Data Eraser offers three flexible data erasure modes.

• Erase Files - permanently erase existing files and folders. Just select the files and folders you want to erase and add them to the erasure list.
• Erase Hard Drive - wipe all data on the hard drive. Just select the hard drive you want to wipe.
• Erase Free Space - erase deleted/lost data on your hard drive. It will not affecting the existing data on the hard drive.

Step 3. After choose the data erasure mode and select the hard drive or files, just click on Erase Now button to permanently erase the target data.

3. The things you should do before selling your laptop.

Before you sell or donate your laptop, first of all, make a backup of the laptop data using external hard drive. Then you can use Donemax Data Eraser to help you securely and permanently wipe your private data from the laptop to prevent potential data recovery. In some cases, you'd better reinstall the operating system. Just like you reset it to factory settings and nobody is able to restore your personal data from it.

Donemax Data Eraser is a powerful data erasure program. It is fully compatible with Windows OS and Mac OS. It not only can help you wipe data from old laptop, but it also can help you erase data from external disk drive, memory card, digital camera, RAID, Server, USB flash drive, etc. Download it here: