A lot of mistakes can happen in what is supposed to be secure data destruction simply out of the carelessness of the people doing it, or a lack of information about what is standard procedure for eliminating data. Many people, for instance, make the terrible mistake of simply giving their decommissioned disks a few bashes with a hammer, then cast them straight into the trash after that. This is not an effective method for clearing data remanence, because a lot of laboratories can very easily reconstruct or retrieve the data from such hardware. Another common mistake that people make is to assume that overwriting the decryption key for a completely encrypted disk is enough to ensure that data is unrecoverable. In actual fact, a lot of decryption keys are not strong enough to withstand some forms of retrieval, especially when they suffer from remanence themselves. Such mistakes may be avoided if you know what to look out for in your methods.

When carrying out secure data destruction through one of the famous physical methods, one thing to avoid is carelessness. Some people accidentally leave or misplace some small fragment of the media, and this spells disaster because even the smallest pieces may contain significant pools of data that some laboratories can mine for sensitive information about you. If you do intend to destroy your disk physically, do not skimp on the process and do it in as safe and clean an environment as you can, so as to avoid clutter that could prevent you from seeing a stray fragment.

Secure data destruction should always be carried out promptly. This is to avoid another of the common mistakes made by people, which is to leave their sensitive disks or media hidden somewhere in the basement or closet. It is all very well to hide a disk you intend to purge until you can do it, but you must remember to purge it within a day or so of hiding it so that you do not inadvertently forget it is there. Procrastination is one of the leading causes for data leaks, because people put personal disks in some hidden-away cabinet with the intention of purging them, then keep putting it off and putting it off-thus giving certain malicious characters a larger and ever-growing window of opportunity to sneak in and steal the data for themselves while you are not looking.

Secure data destruction must be carried out in an organised way, which means keeping track of what has been done and what needs to be done still to purge the sensitive data on your system. In the case of companies, where several systems sometimes need to be purged at the same time, keeping records of the data deletion process is even more important. Most business owners should also institute a deletion protocol in their companies for shared versions of sensitive files and data regarding the company. It may be that keeping such records may be required of the company on occasion, but they do not always have to be accessible to so many people, which means they should be deleted from systems as soon as their use has passed.