Degaussing
If you use computer hard drives, file servers or backup tapes to store personal or financial data, it’s essential that you deal with them securely when the time comes to discard or upgrade them. Shred Station offers a degaussing and data destruction service to ensure data is no longer recoverable.
The benefits of a fully accredited degaussing service
Permanently erases magnetic data
Unlike data erasure software, degaussing offers total data destruction. Degaussing is suitable for all magnetic media such as hard drives, floppy disks, and magnetic tape.
Can be combined with shredding
Some clients prefer a combined degaussing and physical destruction service for items like hard drives. While either service is fine on its own, a dual service provides ultimate peace of mind.
Certificate of destruction
We provide a waste transfer note and certificate of destruction after every service. If you have a lot of devices to degauss, we can include serial numbers on your certificate for your records.
What is data degaussing?
Degaussing is a data sanitisation process for magnetic media that contains sensitive information. Degaussers use a powerful magnetic field to completely remove the data so that it can never be read again.
Degaussing is a much more effective method of destroying digital documents than simply deleting them, erasing the data manually, doing a factory reset, or using software to overwrite them. Data thieves can sometimes recover and read digital data even after it’s been deleted or overwritten.Â
Degaussing services across the United Kingdom
We can carry out degaussing either at your offices, with our mobile unit, or off-site at our own secure premises. Our HDD degausser machine is approved by NATO and the UK government. It also meets the standards set by both the US Department of Defence and the National Security Agency.
Select a region from the map or the drop-down:
Get in touch
To talk through your requirements with a specialist in secure data destruction, please contact us.
Frequently asked questions
See our customers’ frequently asked questions. If your query isn’t answered below, please feel free to head over to our FAQs page for more information.
Hard drive shredders break your hard drives up into many small pieces. Degaussing erases data from your hard drives using a strong magnetic field. Both are great methods of hard drive destruction, if performed by a reputable company with comprehensive accreditations.
Degaussing is a data erasure process. Degaussers work by using a strong magnetic force to de-magnetise devices such as hard drives. Demagnetising these devices wipes all data stored on them.
It is worth noting that degaussing only works on magnetic media. This typically includes hard drives, magnetic tapes, floppy disks, and magnetic cards such as certain types of ID badges or credit cards.
Degaussing will not work on non-magnetic media like solid state drives, CDs, and DVDs. For non-magnetic media, we recommend a shredding service.
No. Degaussing is only a suitable data destruction option for magnetic media devices such as HDDs or floppy disks.
For non-magnetic media, including SSDs and USBs, we offer physical destruction with industrial shredding equipment.
No. Once a magnetic media storage device has been degaussed, there is no way to recover any information or files saved onto the device. The device will be inoperable.
Yes. We can destroy laptops and PCs. With our IT equipment destruction services, there's there's no need for you to remove your hard drives or batteries yourself.
If you would like to try to remove your hard drive yourself, this YouTube video shows how you can remove a hard drive.
Yes. You will receive a Certificate of Destruction via email. With on-site services, this is provided instantly. With off-site services, it may take a few days for us to process the certificate, but it will be sent within 72 hours guaranteed.
Data shredding
Degaussing only works for magnetic media. Data on CDs, DVDs, USB sticks, mobile phones, modern flash drives and other electronics cannot be destroyed by degaussing. However, you can still protect your information security by utilising our fully secure data shredding service.
To make sure data on these devices cannot be recovered, you’ll need our hard drive destruction and digital media destruction services. As with degaussing, we can shred digital devices at your premises or at ours.Â
If you’re the data protection expert at your company or business, we can also set up a regular service for whatever materials you need to destroy securely. Our regular customers receive access to our portal and environmental reports.
To talk through your requirements with a specialist in secure data destruction and work out which services you need, please contact us.
Explore our degaussing options
On-site services
We can carry out degaussing at your offices with our mobile unit, or at our own secure premises.
Off-site services
We will collect your hard disks and magnetic media and transport them to our facilities for degaussing.
One-off services
Hard drive degaussing is available as a one-off or ad-hoc service as and when you need it.
Regular services
Destroy data on magnetic storage media devices regularly with our scheduled service. Confidential waste bins provided.
Secure data destruction services
Related resources
Our articles are written to help our customers feel confident about data destruction.
