I know I'm weighing in a little late on this, but there is something I've kind of wondered about, regarding this. First, let me say that, clearly the safest thing to do if you have any sensitive data on your drive is just to destroy it thoroughly. Now that I have that out of the way, let me ask this. Let's say I have a PC I want to dispose of. I decide I want to donate it, or perhaps sell it on E-bay or Craig's list or something. Let's say that I use a decent file-shredder tool and wipe out the hard drive, complete with many, many rewrites, according to this or that government spec. (plenty of free tools to do this easily). Then, I do a clean resinstall of the OS, and sell or give away the machine. Really now, what do you think are the odds are that anyone will buy this machine, tear it apart, use NSA-like recovery tools to find, what, pictures of my kids? I don't have my SSN anywhere on my computer. I guess they could somehow hack the temporary internet files and strong encryption to find out my email password (which isn't actually set to be stored, but probably is somehow discoverable?) Who would be doing this exactly? What kind of resources might they need? Before you go crazy, ask yourself just what's on the machine you need to protect and who's going to bother? Again, better safe than sorry, but just wondering about how real this is for most people.