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Forget Smashing. Here’s How to Safely Remove Files From a Thumb Drive
Merely deleting files may leave crucial remnants
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How do I get rid of information stored on a portable USB flash or thumb drive? —Donna N.
The short answer, Donna, is to take a hammer and smash the thing to smithereens.
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But the very nature of your question suggests that’s not what you want to do. Instead, you want to reformat the drive and reuse it, maybe recycle it or donate it to a family member or friend.
I suspect that you’re concerned that this small external drive has pictures, videos, files from work and other documents you don’t want nosy neighbors or rivals to see, much less crooks looking to commit fraud or steal your identify.
Your paranoia about stray data is justified
How do you ensure that gone really means gone?
I wouldn’t blame you for feeling a little bit paranoid about deep-sixing data, especially if you never went to the trouble of encrypting or scrambling files in the first place, which would pretty much render the data unreadable to anyone who lacks the password.
A 2019 study from the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom, commissioned by Comparitech, a consumer website devoted to cybersecurity and privacy, revealed nearly 7 in 10 secondhand flash drives sold in the U.S. and similar numbers in the U.K. contained “recoverable data from their previous owners.”
This may make you wonder where the jump drive with your 2018 tax return is hiding. Hitting Delete on your computer keyboard is not enough to make files vanish, nor is manually attempting to overwrite the drive’s memory.
“Even if ... it doesn’t look like there is anything valuable there, there may be information that people can access with forensic recovery tools,” says Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the nonprofit Surveillance Technology Oversight Project in New York.
Reformatting the drive goes a step beyond ‘delete’
If you have uber-sensitive files on the drive, consider data deletion software, some free for home use, that aims to address security vulnerabilities. But for most of us, reformatting the drive to wipe it clean should alleviate most concerns.
On a Mac desktop or laptop, plug the drive into an available USB port and click Finder | Applications | Utilities | Disk Utility. In the left rail, click the file name given to the USB drive if it has one — it may show up as No Name — and click Erase at the top of the screen.
You’ll see options, some too technical to go into here, that let you name the drive, select a file system to encrypt its contents, and choose between erasing files quickly or more slowly.
If you want speedy, you’ll sacrifice security
Going fast means someone could retrieve files with a recovery application. A deliberate pace is a more secure process. After making your selection, click Erase.
On a Windows PC, open File Explorer, right click the file name for the drive, and click Format… You’ll again have the option to choose a file system, as well as a Quick Format box you can check or uncheck to more speedily perform the operation at the expense of better security.
Click Start when you’ve decided. Windows will serve up the following warning: “Formatting will erase ALL data on the disk.” Since that is the whole purpose of this exercise, click OK to complete the exorcism.
Formatting a drive isn’t bulletproof against bad guys armed with sophisticated tools. But you’re significantly improving the odds that you’ll be just fine, and at the very least, you’ll stymie those nosy neighbors.
Bonus tip: Know where that thumb drive came from
USB flash drives are ubiquitous and generally cheap. I have a bunch lying around from companies that through the years loaded press releases and pictures on them.
Never insert a thumb drive into your computer without being 100 percent certain of its origins. The drive could infect your computer with malware or a virus or surreptitiously open a figurative backdoor to the machine that criminals can exploit.
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