Data Security During Laptop Repair

[MissAnonymiss]

What preparatory steps should one take to prevent documents and personal information from being accessied/copied while laptop is out of your possession for servicing?  I have a hardware issue and have to send in for HP for warranty servicing.

[WAWood]

@MissAnonymiss 

You could encrypt the drive using BitLocker, but while that will protect your information, it will really be a waste of time because if HP needs access to the drive do to repairs, and they find it locked, they'll simply replace the drive.

You could even remove the sensitive stuff from your drive and put it onto a USB stick -- but it will still remain behind, even if you go to the trouble to erase it (which does not actually wipe the data from the drive but merely removes the partition index entries).

There are routines that you can run that will actually WIPE drives -- but that can not be done on individual folders or files.

So really, there is little you can do.