[ubuntu-uk] mbr

Andy Smith andy at bitfolk.com
Sat Jan 28 22:12:48 UTC 2012


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.

Cheers,
Andy

-- 
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
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