In the digital age, the number of documents sent has been greatly reduced, but there are still people who use printers. If you are one of those who have completely digitized your business or simply want to reduce your carbon footprint by reducing the amount of paper printed, then think twice before throwing your printer in the trash. since i could contain traces of your recent documents.
The privacy of customer data does not only affect large companies, but also smaller ones and yourself. Sometimes we happen to have a small workshop or a small business that needs to print and send invoices to our customers. We may also have printed a medical document or personal accreditation. Well, keep in mind that some printers have memory and some have more than they should.
Why you shouldn’t throw away your printer
Anything that works with data in digital format has a processor inside and it requires memory to work. The fact is that when we send a document to the printer, the latter must have the ability to interpret it and therefore move its pieces to capture it on paper. So inside there will always be a simple circuit like the one you can see in the picture below.
To work it is not that a printer requires a powerful processor, at the time the high price that some of them had was due to this, but today even less power is needed than a mobile low end. Some may not even work with RAM anymore, but work perfectly with the bandwidth of NAND Flash memory, which also serves as persistent storage and therein lies the problem.
How to solve the problem?
Many manufacturers let you know what information your printer records through its own menu. If you do not know how to check what it stores inside, we recommend that you consult its manual. Note that many high-end models store documents as a kind of large cache to speed up performance. So when it comes to throwing the printer in the trashlook at this menu and if necessary, take your time to delete the documents.
On the other hand, the low-end ones generally have a very low capacity. A trick is to send a large number of blank documents, with around 100 they will suffice in many cases. The printer will not have to print anything, just shift the sheets and each new document will replace the previous one. Which will leave the printer’s storage memory totally zero.
Moreover, some models have a way of erasing all the information without having to go through these two solutions that we have explained to you. This is why it is important to keep the documentation supplied with our equipment. For example, there are models that unplug all cables except the power cable and hold down the power button for a few seconds. In any case, if you don’t have them all, you can always take a hammer and break the circuits or throw them in the right place.