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Recovering Data From Broken Hard Drives and SSDs (Video)
Russell Chozick owns a small company in Austin. TX, called Flashback Data that recovers data from messed-up hard drives. And SSDs and Flash memory, too. How badly damaged does a drive have to be to defeat Russell and his crew? Apparently, smashed to bits. Not long aqo we did a video about a company that destroys data on hard drives, and we've had at least one Ask Slashdot where the question was, "What's the Best Way To Destroy Hard Drives?" In today's video, Russell is talking about the opposite of destruction -- except that he destroys data upon request, too. Obviously, checking the wrong box on a customer order form could cause big problems at Flashback Data, couldn't it? Let's hope they never do that -- and let's hope we all back up all of our data so we never need to use a data recovery service. You do back up all your data, don't you?
not disguised at all. If the first words of the summary arent " somerandomuser writes" , then I know that it wasnt user submitted, and is being pushed in from above. I only come into the comments of these types of stories to verify that I didnt click through to their ads.
you can recover 1 overwrite actually....
You cannot. Or rather:
* Nobody has ever demonstrated success of recovering data from a modern hard drive (anything more recent than MFM) that has been overwritten even one time.
* The person who wrote the paper on recovering data from drives after erasure, Gutmann, has said there is no reason to believe that it is possible with modern drives.
* Other people have a quite sound theoretical arguments that it is impossible. (That is, there is a hysteresis effect, but it is so small compared to noise that the statistical probability of getting correct data instead of random data is much, much too small to be of any practical use even in a best-case scenario.)
This is a myth in computer forensics and security that needs to die.
That's incorrect. Current drives store information in individual (as in single) magnetic domains. A magnetic force microscope is of no help there. Once you flip a domain, you've flipped it. There's no history, no layers, nada. You're referring to information that was current 20 years ago.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
That paper is from 1996. The updated epilogue contains this quote:
Any modern drive will most likely be a hopeless task, what with ultra-high densities and use of perpendicular recording I don't see how MFM would even get a usable image [...]
Let me pile on with the "no you cannot". Once this was true, back in the days of MFM drives, because there was lots of redundant magnetic media on that drive. But the need to squeeze out every last bit of data density on drives has changed that - any place on the media where leftover traces of previous writes could be found is a place where more bits could be fit on the platter. Still, with older IDE drives you might have wanted to do one pass of random data instead of 0s, if you were worried about an opponent with an electron microscope (I've actually seen bits on tape in an electron microscope image - very cool).
GMR drives took that trend even farther, by using the Z-axis to help store each bit, not just the surface of the platter. With modern drives the media is completely used to store current data.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.