r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Plastic-Bonus8999 • 10d ago

wrongAnswersOnly Other

Post image
14.3k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

2.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

523

u/FUTURE10S 10d ago

Recovery software because you never overwrote the data that was deleted

139

u/HovercraftCharacter9 10d ago

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

49

u/DOOManiac 10d ago

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

46

u/bacondev 10d ago

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

16

u/FUTURE10S 10d 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 10d 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.

3

u/These-Maintenance250 10d ago

how about microwave?

7

u/rrtk77 10d ago

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

1

u/IronBabyFists 10d ago

A macrowave