There's currently no Apple-provided method to securely erase your iPhone's data, and previous owners' data has been found on refurbished phones on sale at Apple. If you want to make your iPhone safe for resale by securely wiping any trace of your personal information from it, it's possible—though not easy. Security guy Jonathan Zdziarski posted his method for doing so, which requires jailbreaking your phone (here's how), then getting shell access to its hard drive, and wiping its two partitions clean using some command line fu. Warning: I have not tried this on my own iPhone, so proceed with the utmost caution. Zdziarski says the whole process can take an hour or two. Of course wiping your regular old computer hard drive is a lot easier—just grab a free utility like Eraser or Wipe Disk to do so. Update: There are a couple other good reasons to SSH into your iPhone—to copy music and other media off of it to your computer, to use it as a SOCKS proxy to get your computer online, to wirelessly sync it in Linux, and now, to wipe your data.

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Ack! The computer ate my term paper! We've all been there at some point. You delete an important file, somehow it skips your Recycle Bin altogether, and for all practical purposes, it's disappeared into the ether. But before you hit the big red panic button, there's a very good chance that your file is still alive and kicking somewhere on your hard drive—you just need to know how to find it. With the right tools, finding and recovering that deleted file can be as simple as a few clicks of your mouse.

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Windows only: Secure file deletion utility Wipe File is a one-purpose program that lets you choose how many times a file on your hard drive is erased, written over, then deleted over and over. The convenience comes in its ability to run from its own folder on a thumb drive, as well as the options you have for deletion cycles, with notations as to what various agencies (like the Department of Defence or NATO) use as their standards. The program is German native, but head to the Extras menu to switch it over to English. Wipe File is a free download for Windows systems only; check out Wipe Disc if you're looking for whole-sale erasure for a computer or drive transfer.

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