How to Remove Sensitive Information From Copiers

With identify theft and governmental compliance concerns being so important in business, one piece of office equipment that should not be overlooked is your copier. Digital copiers have hard drives that store images of every copy and print job sent to the device. This information can be accessed by people you may not want to have the information stored on the hard drive. Removing the data before getting rid of the copier is important to maintain confidentiality.

• 1

  Install disk scrubbing software. The scrubbing software needs to be installed on a computer that is connected to the same network that the digital copier is on. To install the software, double-click on either the "install" or "setup.exe" file. Doing so will begin the installation process.

• 2

  Choose the copier's hard drive to scrub. Disk scrubbing software programs can browse your network and locate all the available hard drives. Most scrubbing software will list found hard drives. Select the copier hard drive from the list by clicking on it.

• 3

  Run the program. After being certain that you selected the correct hard drive, press the "Start" or "Scrub" button in the scrubbing software's main screen. The scrubbing process may take well over an hour to complete. During this time, make sure that the copier is not used and the connection between the network and computer is not interrupted.

• 4

  Unplug the copier. Once the scrubbing process has been completed, the entire hard drive of the digital copier will be erased. Without the operating system installed, the copier will not be able to work. Unplugging the copier and, if possible, moving it to a storage location will avoid having employees try to use the non-functional device.