At some point, the computer you’re using will become outdated, and you’ll find it necessary to upgrade it to a newer, faster one. Such is the way of life in the PC world. When you do get that shiny new desktop, you may decide to give away or sell your retired machine. If so, there is something that you should always do: Reformat the hard drive. However, if you have sensitive information, such as tax records and bank statements stored on there, you might not feel comfortable, even with a basic reformatting.
So how do you make sure that your data is gone forever? Well, you have some choices. Completely destroying the hard drive is one, but that’s a waste of good equipment. Over at MakeUseOf, they’ve outlined a number of different methods for destroying your data in such a way that no mere mortal will be able to recover it. My personal way of dealing with this issue is to simply not store any sensitive data on my computers. Instead, I keep everything on a NAS box, and just use the hard drives until they die.