My office is relocating and we have about 12-16 old laptops.
As we are now relocation to smaller space and company has decided to dispose of laptops ethically and safely.
We are based in North Sydney,
I am told that Officeworks accept old computing stuff, happy to drop laptop there but the question is which contain records before we dispose.
Also, is there any agency available that recycle old laptops for desiring people in the community?
Thank you all who will give their guidance.
wipe off old harddisk
DBAN it.
recycle old laptops for desiring people in the community.
On the off chance it's an SSD, DBAN is a bad idea. But I'm guessing if they're laptops old enough to be given away they don't have SSDs
The cheapest way is to ask the staff if they want a laptop for their kids and give them away. You can get them to wipe the HDD at work. Google "Wipe HDD securely" and have a read up, but you do not need the hard core defence type wipe, just one that wipes all of the HDD sectors.
Other options will take time and/or cost money. Officeworks do not wipe hard disks as they pass it onto a recycler and its up to them….
You can google IT recyclers, but they may not take them if they are worth nothing. There are organizations that will take the laptops, wipe them and reinstall an OS and give them to children, but I do not know who or where they are.
nah…children of employed people usually can afford laptops..need to donate to actual charity…
Another helpful post for the op to read…NOT.
Remove the hard drives and then dispose of em anyway you like.
then get someone like ironmountain to shred the drives
Yep definitely remove the drives yourself and deal with them separately.
If you have a corporate arrangement with someone like Iron Mountain for these types of services that's going to be fine.
If this is a more DIY affair, do what many others have suggested here in terms of various tools to "wipe" the drives, then remove them from the PCs, and to the extent you can/feel comfortable physically dismantle the drives yourself, and then put everything into tubs of salt water. Once the everything's nice and rusty you can then physically dispose of the materials in what ever way is appropriate to you.
Asylum seekers centre takes laptops, there's a few places around that will take them - https://secure.asylumseekerscentre.org.au/content/donate-dev…. Computerbank in Melbourne is great, although I can't find something similar in Sydney.
Depends on age though. If you're dusting off something from the Windows XP era it's likely not much use to anyone and I'd go with officeworks for recycling. If they're fairly new, it could even be better to flog them off on ebay and donate the money from it to a charity.
Using a company to do the wipe and restore is probably a good idea, just because it's time consuming to do it yourself properly. Create a bootable drive to do the wipe (with DBAN if a harddrive, or the SSD vendor tools if a SSD) then wiping 12 computers and reinstalling windows 12 times is a bit of a slow process.
I have used Disk Utility on macOS a number of times to wipe HDDs and it has worked fine. Disk Utility on macOS is quite straightforward to use and user-friendly. I'd be comfortable doing that for personal devices, but I'm not so sure about professional devices that may have held client data or other sensitive data.
I'm sure about Windows or Linux alternatives to Disk Utility.
You should be checking if your organization has any requirements to sanitize data, whether its their own policies, or something imposed by ISO certification requirements.
If nothing, then DBAN away as mentioned before. If there are requirements, then you should look at an organization that will certify the data destroyed (verser or whoever) and give you a certificate stating so.
It's all about covering your arse if you have to. Data breaches can lead to serious consequences for organizations.
Since you are in North Sydney, I recommend using Payam's free disk erasing/recycling service - 3rd option on this page:
https://www.payam.com.au/data-destruction-services/
They will professionally erase the drives with a degausser, strip the drives for parts and issue you with a proper certificate of destruction
If you are going to donate them, think about an aged care center.
They could be set up for residents to communicate with family, or for games to play.
I usually donate any tv/dvd setups when i upgrade, and they are very thankful.
if you are just submitting them for disposal, the best way is to drill a hole right though the HDD(and casing if required). If they are oldish laptops, you can rip the hdd out and destroy it, it wont cost much for a new HDD. This is the only true way to get rid of data form a HDD.
Just depends how sensitive your company's info is. if its not overboard, just use any wipe software available. Unless someone was ganna take your company down. no one is going to try and restore the data anyway. and if this is the case, just use the windows options available.
Hammer or drill it.
Thank you all and everyone for guiding me. They are not so sensitive data of defence level but they have a lot of data from old employees who had left.
I appreciate all of you who has to spend their time to put a line and again thank you.
also, learn good advice to drop old TV and DVD to the age care centre and they would appreciate to use them.
Physically destroy the drives.
Failing that, Use this https://partedmagic.com/secure-erase/
The best method is NOT having data on the drive in the first place. This can be achieved by using full-disk encryption or self-encrypting drives.
Always used https://www.eraseit.com.au/. If there's client data on the computers that could put you up for a data breach then you definitely want them professionally wiped before repurposing.