The Great Zero Challenge Remains Unaccepted

An anonymous reader writes "Not even data recovery companies will accept The Great Zero Challenge and only four months remain! We've all heard how easily data can be recovered from hard drives. We're told to make multiple overwrites with random data, to degauss drives and even physically destroy them just to be extra safe. Let's get the word out. The challenge is almost over! It's put up or shut up time. Can you recover the data?"

Comments

Electron microscope

[Anonymous Coward]

By using multiple overwrites, your are future-proofing versus new technologies that, if I understand it, would be able to duplicate what a team could currently achieve with an electron microscope and a lot of boring work.

All this challenge does is show that no one is willing to recover data for a free drive and forty bucks. Since the assumed ways to recover data that has been overwritten all cost way more than this, it's as if I issued a challenge to anyone who could demonstrate digging into the ground and finding oil, and the reward is a hundred dollars. Pretty good odds no one would "disprove" that either, just because it's not worth a hundred dollars to an oil company to parse, digest, and follow the instructions to obtain a hundred bucks.

Re:000 00 00000 000000000

[thermian]

11111 111 1111 111 11111 11 11111 1111111111 :)

Forty dollars?? Why would anybody enter this?

[Geoffrey.landis]

Let's see, you pay shipping both ways, you're not allowed to disassemble the drive, you're "allowed" to do three days of work (suppose eight hours per day, a hundred dollars an hour, about twenty-four hundred dollars worth of labor)... and if you win, you get forty dollars. And you get to keep the drive.

Why would anybody enter this "contest"?

I would certainly believe, for what it's worth, that you can't recover the data from an overwritten drive without disassembling it. That's a "well, duh" statement. You have to get at the physical media. And it's certainly going to cost you more than the forty dollars, minus the amount you paid for round-trip shipping, that you could win.