In today’s age of identity theft and digital pilfering, properly disposing of sensitive business data is absolutely critical to ensure your business is protected.   Here are a few quick tips for proper disposal of media such as tapes or hard drives.

• The best way to dispose of tapes or floppy disks is to shred them.  Alternatively, you can take a hammer and break the case on the backup tape cartridges so that the tape spool is completely exposed.  Then make sure that the tape unspools into some sort of container.  “Fluff up” the tape as it unspools and take a scissors and cut it up. Remove any identifiable information and labels. 
• Hard drives are a little more challenging.  You can purchase software that will perform a low level format of the drive or is designed to erase data.  Our favorite is WipeDrive Pro: http://www.whitecanyon.com/wipedrive-pro-erase-harddrive.php which is reasonably priced and easy to use.
• Do not dispose of the media in your office trash.  Take it home or to some other non-business disposal location, you do not want to call attention to what you are throwing away. Or, better yet, take it to be recycled.

Alternatively, The Launch Pad and take care of this for you or take the drive to a facility that specializes in data recovery/destruction.