Shredding time! How Uptrends protects your data on old devices

Data protection is an essential part of the Uptrends process. When it comes time to remove your data from our retired hard drives and servers, we do it right. We go to great lengths to make sure your data is never accessible to hackers or anyone else for that matter by turning it into a pile of confetti. We stand closely by and watch while our old hardware gets ground into little bitty bits.

The data destruction process

The only way to guarantee that hackers can’t steal your data off of discarded equipment is to destroy it physically. We aren’t talking about taking hammers to the old hardware—although that would fun—we are talking about putting it through a shredder that grinds it into little tiny pieces.

A company that specializes in the destruction of sensitive data took care of the shredding. We feed the hardware into the jaws of a shredder that looks like a giant version of your office’s paper shredder. The shredders grinding blades and hungry teeth make a quick meal of it.

The hardware shredder's grinding blades

After the first grinding, the little bits go up a conveyor. At the end of the conveyor is another shredder that takes the small bits and shreds them again into little bits of unidentifiable plastic and metal.

The shredded hard drives travel up the conveyor

The conveyor dumps the pieces into the back of a truck where the tiny chunks mix with the remains of hundreds of other devices.

The truck loaded with shredded hardware

It’s all great fun to watch! After leaving our offices, the truck drops the pieces off at a recycling center. The recycling center separates the metal from the plastic and ships it off for further processing into other objects. If shredding wasn’t enough, nobody is going to find your data after someone turns the hard drive into soap bottles or a pile of bolts.

Hardware shredding is part of ISO/ICE 27001 compliance

This isn’t the first time the shredding truck has parked itself outside Uptrends’ headquarters. Uptrends’ policy has always been to destroy any storage medium that could result in the compromise of user data. The policy is all part of the ISO/ICE 27001 security standards that Uptrends has adopted into its ISMS (Information Security Management System). By adhering to these tight standards, we promise you that you won’t find any identifiable intact decommissioned hardware with your Uptrends data anywhere.