On 28 January 2012 22:12, Andy Smith <a...@bitfolk.com> wrote: > Hi Liam, > > On Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 09:24:52PM +0000, Liam Proven wrote: >> Well, in theory, if you paid Kroll Ontrack £LOTS then they claim to be >> able to get much or all of the data off a zero-overwritten drive by >> meticulously examining the very edge of the tracks for a sort of >> magnetic overspill. Costs tens of thousands or more, though. > > I do not believe that any commercial data recovery company will > promise to be able to retrieve anything that corresponds to even a > small fraction of your data after you tell them you've done this. > > Have you ever heard of a company promising to be able to do this? > > http://whereismydata.wordpress.com/2009/02/06/deleting-and-wiping-data/ > > In fact companies such as Ontrack, who spend millions of dollars > on research into data recovery are not able to do this. This > wiping does not need to be done 33, 12, or even 3 times. Just > once. > > There was once a challenge to see if anyone would be able to recover > data from a disk that was overwritten once, and after describing > what had been done, no company was interested in trying. However > IIRC the bounty for the challenge was something trivial like <$100, > so it wasn't a very useful challenge unfortunately. > > But supposing you have a team of people with electron microscopes > willing to spend months examining each sector of the surface of this > drive you have wiped once, the chances of working out what state > each bit was in before the wipe are 49% on modern drives: > > > http://www.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/securityfocus/security-basics/2008-10/msg00199.html > > i.e. you would achieve more success flipping a coin and writing 1 > for heads and 0 for tails. > > If anyone has ever been able to retrieve any useful data off of a > disk that's been wiped once, I've never heard of it. They should > tell someone, because they would be a world-wide sensation and no > doubt have governments beating a path to their door. > > Even so, I still DBAN where other people's data is concerned, > because people always have this sort of doubt.
Hmm. Fair enough. I will take you word for it. IIRC I was told this when touring Dr Solomon's, way back in the mid-1990s when I was the staff technical expert on PC Pro magazine. Perhaps in those days of relatively chunky data tracks, it was viable, whereas now it isn't. I don't know. Also, a bounty of $100? Forget it. Dr Solly's used to charge in the thousands of pounds for normal data recovery off merely mechanically-damaged drives. The extreme stuff cost *lots* more. I wouldn't think they'd bother unless there was a prize of £x00,000 to £x,000,000. It was a /very/ lucrative business - few could do what they did. Which is why they sold off the antivirus side of the business to McAfee, which ultimately killed the company, I believe. Division of some of the giant brains and so on. -- Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lpro...@hotmail.com • Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 • Cell: +44 7939-087884 -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
