Adrian Caspersz wrote:
On 16/04/2021 09:01, SH wrote:

Plus once an attacker has your details, they can make themselves *far*
more convincing when they phone you and say Hello Mr/Mrs/Miss XXXXX,
I'm from (high Street bank), we've detected suspiscious acitivity on
your bank account number XXYYZZ, we see its a joint account with youe
spouse, Mr/mrs XXXX and we see you have a pension plan with Pension
provider from the direct debits etc etc......

I see you use Windows*. "They" probably already have your data.

Just joking....

The biggest exposure with Windows users, is them not
knowing that the "format" command, does not overwrite
the data clusters on the disk. After a "format",
the buyer of your disk can use Photorec to dig up
the data. And that's precisely what some connoisseurs
of used disks have reported doing for fun - they're not
interested in your data, they check this so they can make
fun of how stoopid you are. "I found his email files"

To erase a Windows disk, you can (administrator command prompt)

diskpart
list disks
select disk 2
clean all # writes 0x00 over entire disk drive
exit

On a large drive, that could take three hours.
When the buyer runs Photorec, they won't find anything.

*******

You can verify drive contents with a hex editor like this one.
On a zeroed drive, you can quickly scroll through and check.

https://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/

None of this helps with broken drives of course.

Paul