Physical destruction involves shredding items like hard drives, smartphones, printers, laptops, and other storage devices. Large mechanical shredding machines handle this process, ensuring that the data stored on these devices is completely destroyed and unrecoverable. This method is highly effective and is often used for highly sensitive data that cannot risk being leaked.

Also known as Crypto Erase, this process involves using encryption software (either built-in or deployed) on the entire storage drive and then erasing the key used to decrypt the data. This method ensures that even if the data remains on the drive, it is completely inaccessible without the decryption key. The encryption used typically employs a minimum of 128-bit algorithms, providing a high level of security.

Data erasure is a software-based method that securely overwrites the data on the storage device with zeros and ones, covering all sectors of the device. Unlike simple data wiping, data erasure includes a verification step to ensure that the data has been completely overwritten and cannot be recovered.