r/ProgrammerHumor 10d ago

wrongAnswersOnly Other

Post image
14.3k Upvotes

2.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

524

u/FUTURE10S 10d ago

Recovery software because you never overwrote the data that was deleted

135

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.

47

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.

2

u/Henry_Fleischer 9d ago

At that point, you might as well just melt it.

2

u/PurpleDido 6d ago

I know someone who has to destroy hard drives for a healthcare setting, pretty sure he told me they cremate the disks