In such cases, it makes perfect sense to properly recycle or dispose of older storage drives. However, simply deleting the files stored on the drive isn't enough to ensure your data is safely erased. If your drive ever falls into the wrong hands, data recovery software could still succeed in restoring those deleted files. An old flash drive containing sensitive documents such as tax records or scanned IDs could turn into a privacy risk. Cornell University's IT security guidance recommends that functional drives to be recycled should be overwritten three times, and those that are to be disposed of should be physically destroyed.