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I was reading this and just thought I would throw in my IT opinion regarding info on your computer's harddrive.

First off, when you delete something from your drive, your system just hides it from your view and marks it as "able to be written over". It's still there until you computer needs to write something new to disk, and needs the space that the old information lies in.

A normal format will not remove all of the information from your disk either. The info can still be recovered with the right equipment. This equipment is kind of cool in that instead of reading with a drive head looking straight down onto your drive platter, it has 2 heads that read from either side of where the bit was written (bit being the 1 or 0). This allows it to read what was written there before the bit changed. This is why there are DOD format utilities. Google "DOD wipe" and you will see what I'm talking about. There are several DOD standards for removing data. This normally writes all ones or all zeroes on your harddrive about 7 times over (7 passes). It's a long process, but I've had to do it for companies that I work for when disposing of harddrives that have proprietary information.

If you just format your drive, and then punch a whole through it, "they" can take the platters out of your drive, and recover the data around the hole.

And this is just a drive. Once the info is out on the internet... I'm not even going there.