Don't let your used computers out the door without first securely erasing all their hard disks. Unless you like being the victim of identity and data theft.

, DBAN for short, is operating system-independent and works on IDE, SCSI, and SATA hard drives on x86 and PowerPC systems.

DBAN is easy to use: download and copy it to the bootable media of your choice -- 3.5" diskette, CD/DVD, USB stick, or PXE boot over a network-- fire it up, and let 'er rip. You can wipe all hard disks on a system, or just selected ones.

Oh no, you hit the delete button and now you want your file back! What do you do? The first thing you do is stop and don't do anything. When you delete a file it's still there on your hard disk, with the space it uses marked as available for new files to be written on, so as long as it's not overwritten you can recover it. (If you ran DBAN, sorry, it's gone for good.) (for "recovery", not "wreck") recovers individual files of any kind and not just photos. TestDisk is a marvelous companion program for repairing damaged partition and boot tables. Both work on all major operating systems and filesystems, and have excellent documentation that tells you exactly what to do.