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At the international level, the concern for restricting transboundary movement of hazardous wastes is reflected in the Basel Convention (1989) and subsequent follow-up activities.
Data sanitization is the process of deliberately, permanently and irreversibly removing or destroying the data stored on a memory device to make it unrecoverable. A device that has been sanitized has no usable residual data, and even with the assistance of advanced forensic tools, the data will not ever be recovered. There are three methods to achieve data sanitization: physical destruction, cryptographic erasure and data erasure.
Physical Destruction
This is the process of shredding hard drives, smartphones, printers, laptops and other storage media into tiny pieces by large mechanical shredders or using degaussers.
Hammering
This is a part of Physical destruction in which HDD are hammered and broken so that it cannot be set in the HDD slot and hence cant be used any further, this is not a full proof method of removing the data as the destructed pieces contains the data in full
Cryptographic Erasure
Cryptographic erasure (or Crypto Erase) uses encryption software on the entire data storage device, erasing the decryption key, making the data unrecoverable. This achieves data sanitization and is used interchangeably with Crypto Erase.
Data erasure Machines
These are the software-based method of securely overwriting data from any data storage device using zeros and ones onto all sectors of the device. By overwriting the data on the storage device, the data is rendered unrecoverable and achieves data sanitization.
Data Degaussing
Degaussing erases magnetic data on media like hard drives, tapes, and disks. It neutralizes the magnetic field, ensuring data destruction and making it unrecoverable. Degaussing is the guaranteed method of hard drive erasure and serves as the standard for data destruction, providing peace of mind that your information is irretrievable.