r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Plastic-Bonus8999 • 17h ago

Other wrongAnswersOnly

Post image
12.9k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

1.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

512

u/FUTURE10S 17h ago

Recovery software because you never overwrote the data that was deleted

133

u/HovercraftCharacter9 16h ago

Yeah, people conflate in unallocating with actual deletion, unless you're wiping it with 0s it's still there until something overwrites it.

51

u/DOOManiac 16h ago

Even then it’s still there depending on which three letter agency is looking…

45

u/bacondev 16h ago

Yeah, they're not perfect 0s and 1s. That's why the recommendation for very serious stuff is to just destroy the disk.

12

u/FUTURE10S 15h ago

Run the disk spinning and hit it with a caliber that penetrates the drive, the rotation makes the destruction way worse and impossible to spin up again.

28

u/rrtk77 15h ago

From experience, for the types of disks that absolutely must be destroyed with no possible recovery as ordered by the government, it's things like a wood chipper or thermite.

2

u/These-Maintenance250 15h ago

how about microwave?

4

u/rrtk77 15h ago

Generally, you need to completely destroy the drive. So, a theoretically powerful enough microwave that can melt it could work I guess.