  Landauer's principle states that information erasure requires heat
dissipation. Landauer's original result focused on equilibrium memories. We
here investigate the reset of information stored in a nonequilibrium state of a
symmetric two-state memory. We derive a nonequilibrium generalization of the
erasure principle and demonstrate that the corresponding bounds on work and
heat may be reduced to zero. We further introduce reset protocols that harness
the initial preparation energy and entropy and so allow to reach these
nonequilibrium bounds. We finally provide numerical simulations with realistic
parameters of an optically levitated nanosphere memory that support these
findings. Our results indicate that local dissipation-free information reset is
possible away from equilibrium.
