Data recovery (was: Re: SETI at home (ca. 2000) servers heading to salvage)

[Ethan O'Toole]

> For those in the know, how much success - assuming a "money is no object" 
> approach - do data recovery companies have in retrieving data from drives 
> that have a) been overwritten with zeros using dd or similar, and b) been 
> overwritten with random data via a more comprehensive tool?
> cheers,
> Jules

I am pretty sure someone had a bounty out there, they give you a hard 
drive that had a phase on it that is stored linear on the platter. They 
write over it once with zeros. If you can recover the phrase then you win 
the bounty.

It's unclaimed.

Everyone talks about some theoretical ideas but no proof of it being done. 
My understanding is once you erase the data it's difficult to tell the 
difference between something recently erased and the noise floor. This was 
last time I looked into this which was a while ago. Maybe nation state 
has some ability but you or your customers data isn't worth the hassle.

Prior employer would just have hundreds/thousands of pounds of hard drives 
ground up though. To eliminate any risk of data leakage. I am sure the 
same is done with SSDs by other companies and the US Government. 
Probably grinding up $9000 8TB SSDs all day.



--
: Ethan O'Toole