5 Jan
2016
5 Jan
'16
3 p.m.
On Tue, 5 Jan 2016, ethan at 757.org wrote:
If a disk has all zeros written to it, as far as I
know from what I've read
there is no hope of recovering the data. There were rumors that the
government could do it based on really fine detection of magnetic levels or
something -- but it was rumor. There are bounties out there if anyone can
pull it off.
I will heartily agree that recovery ceases to be PRACTICAL.
NSA has done substantial serious research on that and other recovery.
1) if the alignment of the head of the original recording and of the
overwrite head are not a perfect match, then there can be some residual
data somewhat off axis.
2) if the data was overwritten once, with a known pattern, then somebody
with sufficient resources and motivation can attempt to analyze the noise,
and determine "what, overwritten by a 0 could produce the noise that we
have here." Accordingly, there are guvmint standards of MULTIPLE patterns
to overwrite with to render such extreme techniques unusable.
However, I will heartily agree that recovery ceases to be PRACTICAL.
I understand data can be recovered when the file entry
is removed from an
allocation table but data has not been zereod/randomly written over.
truly trivial.
tl;dr: single pass is fine -- no need to triple pass
erase.
THAT depends on who is after you. I don't do anything interesting enough
to warrant using a simplistic trivial UNERASE utility. (Which is what
launched Norton fUtilities)
NSA is not interested in what I am doing.