How to safeguard the private data during a computer repair?

Just in time you encountered a problem with the system and don’t know how to fix it. You make a call to the support and they recommend you to leave the computer in their service station for few days. Isn’t it a general scenario during a computer visit to the service center? I remember when took my brother's DELL Vostro 1410 Laptop to the service center that took it for a whole day and returned me with the ready machine next day. I wondered, although the technician being an honest person doesn't bother to look into your hard drive. But what if someone in curiosity or a person with bad intention tries to access your photographs, images and other confidential data during the repair? If it occurs, this could be very nasty for the user.

I am sharing some of the information through which the user can prevent the data getting into someone’s hand. Here's the process:

• Take backup of the partition.
• To take the back-up use either cloning, imaging.
• Mac users can take time machine backup on an external hard drive.
  

This will ensure that even your hard drive gets tampered during the repair; you still have the access of your data through proper back up measures. But let’s not forget the data is still in open for any third person to gain access. Now what to do with the data that is accessible even during the repair.

• Organize a small data management campaign and prepare the list of private data needs to be secured.
• When all the data files, even the smallest of them is complied, make them write either on a large capacity BD disc, an external drive. If you have server connectivity then it’s too good to store data safe and secure over there.
• If you are a cloud user then use the online data storage facility.
• Formatting the hard drive will definitely erase the data from the hard drive but to guarantee data deletion from the drive one must secure clean it.
• How to secure wipe the data from the system: To do so hard drive needs to be erased using several passes. These passes are provided by the set of wiping algorithms that ensure safe deletion of the data beyond the scope of recovery. Here, Mac & Win users can run a third party wiping software to erase the confidential data through several passes.