If you erase your hard drive, though, you can rest assured that your personal information is no easily recoverable by a program or someone with high-level computer knowledge. This can be an issue if you’ve donated or sold your machine to someone else who has an interest in recovering your personal information. You may also like: How to boost your Wi-Fi for good Anyone with knowledge of how to recover that information - or even someone using a program like RecoverMyFiles - may be able to recover that data from the reformatted hard drive.
That basically means that not all information will be cleaned out of your computer by reformatting it, and there will be traces leftover.