Re: "Hard drive destruction 'crucial'" (BBC)

[der Mouse <mouse () rodents-montreal org>]

> > Hint: If it were economically feasible to recover overwritten data,
> > the large data-recovery companies would offer that service.

And perhaps they do, but don't advertise it because only governments
and very large companies (and other organizations with similarly deep
pockets) can afford it.  How often do you think there is data worth
spending that much to recover?  Most organizations with data worth that
much don't let the drives out in any form there's any chance of
recovering the data from.  (I'm not talking slegehammer destruction;
I'm talking thermite.)  The only real market I can see is to recover
accidentally overwritten data, and that requires that somehow a drive
had the only copy (unlikely) _and_ got so carelessly treated as to get
overwritten (also unlikely).

How long does it take to extract gigabytes of data by using an atomic
force microscope to image each bit's recording area?  I don't know how
fast they are, but whatever fraction of a second it takes to extract a
byte, reading a gigabyte of disk will take an equal fraction of a
gigasecond, which I shall let you work out for yourselves.  It'd have
to be a comparatively small amount of data and you'd have to know at
least approximately where on the disk to look for it, for recovery to
be economic....

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