On Jun 18, Rick Macdonald wrote > > Well, you could overwrite the file with gibberish _before_ deleting it. > I think that's what Norton does, several times if I remember correctly. > That's to comply with US federal regs, which seem a bit superstitious to > me! Actually, the giberrish itself is probably some specified bit pattern.
Actually it's not superstition at all. I think you can still recover a file that's been overwritten once with zeroes... just open the HD (in a clean room, of course) and read off the sectors with a electron microscope (or something like that). The voltage levels will all be bellow the 'zero threshold' but they won't be all equal, and from the small variations you can recover the contents of the file before it was overwritten with zeroes. Of course, whatever was written on your hard drive must be worth quite a bit of cash (to you or to other people) for this recovery method to make sense economically. So the 'overwrite multiple times' precaution is probably overkill for the vast majority of people. Christian
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