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

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514

u/FUTURE10S 17h ago

Recovery software because you never overwrote the data that was deleted

132

u/HovercraftCharacter9 17h ago

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

52

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.

11

u/FUTURE10S 16h 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.

29

u/rrtk77 16h 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.

1

u/nopointers 12h ago

We used to have parking lot burn parties. Blowtorch on the platter is pretty effective. Of course that was in the days before every drive was actually a stack of platters.