What would you do before selling your laptop? - page 2.

ReiMomo

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Quote from: boyptc on May 30, 2020, 06:06:43 AM

To remove your worries replace the drive with a new one and take the old.

This is a good suggestion though.

Private keys for your bitcoin wallet are highly secured and cannot be easily recovered by anyone other than you IF you keep this on your drive not online. Though I didn't sell my laptop yet since I started in bitcoin I am also planning and never thought of it as well. Now I am thinking to seek technical assistance from someone that is legit and I trusted much.

Anyway, right now I am hoping that someone in this thread could really give us an idea or option on how to make sure that our private key can no longer be recovered by the nested user when I sell this one too.

boyptc

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To remove your worries replace the drive with a new one and take the old.

That's how you could solve your problem, you have the possible back up without worrying about other people taking it. I have watched some recovery videos that even you wipe out data for many times and formatting it, some experts still have a way to retrieve old data on those drives.

NeuroticFish

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Quote from: Oasisman on May 30, 2020, 05:47:33 AM

I wonder If these disk wiping programs were legit?

When I've used such a program, years ago, on a proper old-fashion HDD, it seemed to do what it said: made the data unrecoverable. At least from my tests back then it was so.
However, in SSD era, all this doesn't matter anymore.

Oasisman

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I wonder If these disk wiping programs were legit? I haven't tried using this service, considering there's a lot of tutorials in the internet about how to recover data even from a dead hard drive (but I think that requires special expertise?) So, I guess it's possible to bring back those data back then.
Since we're not too sure about the security of your data, then some of the best options are already suggested from the above commenters.

NeuroticFish

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Quote from: Lunatic_Pandora on May 30, 2020, 05:41:07 AM

It doesn't have a classic hard-drive. It has an NVME, its already at the top of the performance chart hard-drive wise. I'll probably end up buying a new NVME to replace it before the new one arrives.

Then indeed the overwrite method may not work.
So: either new wallets and account settings (maybe it's time for a hardware wallet too), either new SSD.

Lunatic_Pandora

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Quote from: Lucius on May 30, 2020, 05:27:29 AM

I would sell such a laptop only without a hard drive, regardless of all the methods that exist to completely erase the data, the risk is always there. In addition, if the laptop has a classic hard drive the performance of such a device can be significantly improved by installing a solid state drive (SSD) which is not a big investment (around $50 for 256 GB drive).

Quote from: Lunatic_Pandora on May 30, 2020, 05:02:35 AM

Or should I just surrender to my paranoia, buy a new drive, and take out the current one?

If you want to be completely safe, then either install a new one (preferably an SSD), or try to sell a laptop without a hard drive.

It doesn't have a classic hard-drive. It has an NVME, its already at the top of the performance chart hard-drive wise. I'll probably end up buying a new NVME to replace it before the new one arrives.

Lucius

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I would sell such a laptop only without a hard drive, regardless of all the methods that exist to completely erase the data, the risk is always there. In addition, if the laptop has a classic hard drive the performance of such a device can be significantly improved by installing a solid state drive (SSD) which is not a big investment (around $50 for 256 GB drive).

Quote from: Lunatic_Pandora on May 30, 2020, 05:02:35 AM

Or should I just surrender to my paranoia, buy a new drive, and take out the current one?

If you want to be completely safe, then either install a new one (preferably an SSD), or try to sell a laptop without a hard drive.

Lunatic_Pandora

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Quote from: mk4 on May 30, 2020, 05:09:54 AM

If you really want to be totally sure and at the same time have the peace of mind, probably just swap out the hard drive. For your past files to be as totally as unrecoverable as possible(I'm not even sure if there's such thing as 100% unrecoverable), as far as I know it's probably going to be quite complicated that you might as well just save yourself the time and change the hard drive.

Yeah I think paranoia would lead me into this conclusion eventually, NVMEs are not that expensive anymore these days so its not that big of a expense.

Quote from: NeuroticFish on May 30, 2020, 05:13:48 AM

There are programs that overwrite your harddisk with random data, cluster by cluster. I've needed one long ago for Windows, I don't know what you use, but I'm sure a search will help you out. That should be pretty safe.

Another idea would be to make on the new laptop completely new wallets for the crypto you've used and transfer your coins to the new wallets. Of course, you'll also need to change the passwords and 2FA for all the accounts if you are this paranoid.

But I think that proper full overwrite should do.

I read about a couple of these, I wonder if they work well with NVMEs as well.

NeuroticFish

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There are programs that overwrite your harddisk with random data, cluster by cluster. I've needed one long ago for Windows, I don't know what you use, but I'm sure a search will help you out. That should be pretty safe.

Another idea would be to make on the new laptop completely new wallets for the crypto you've used and transfer your coins to the new wallets. Of course, you'll also need to change the passwords and 2FA for all the accounts if you are this paranoid.

But I think that proper full overwrite should do.

mk4

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If you really want to be totally sure and at the same time have the peace of mind, probably just swap out the hard drive. For your past files to be as totally as unrecoverable as possible(I'm not even sure if there's such thing as 100% unrecoverable), as far as I know it's probably going to be quite complicated that you might as well just save yourself the time and change the hard drive.

Lunatic_Pandora

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I'm faced with this very question myself. I just bought a new laptop, and it is on the way - my old laptop already has a new owner waiting for her. Still, I used to do a lot of crypto stuff with this laptop, and I'm afraid a regular drive wipe won't be enough to get rid of all my private key stuff that could give access to my crypto to someone else...

So other than doing a regular wipe, maybe 2 or 3, what would you do to guarantee that those keys are not recoverable? Or should I just surrender to my paranoia, buy a new drive, and take out the current one? I'm pretty sure people here have faced this very question here.

How would you protect your Bitcoin and alt-coins private keys from being taken over by someone attempting to recover data from your drive on purpose or accidentally?

Topic: What would you do before selling your laptop? - page 2. (Read 279 times)