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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?
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.