/\ Hooray! 
Mind you, I'm just happy that people will actually do some research on this topic and look for evidence. When I first decided to post in this thread I thought it was a rather ironic topic, given the lack of strong evidence and yet the intense strength of the belief in the computer industry.
I get quite a lot of flak from logical "computer nerd" people whom I discuss this with on other forums. It seems to be a belief that is ingrained and very popular. Fair enough too - I mean, it sounds pretty reasonable on the outset and hard drives are almost magical in how they function anyway.
I just find it interesting to discuss it with logical thinkers when all they really have to back up their claims is a belief, rather than any evidence whatsoever. I'm not singling anyone out with this - I shared the belief myself until I actually spent the time to do some research.
During that research I remember seeing an ad on the web from a data recovery franchise with offices all over the globe. They made mention of overwritten data, and even had a picture of an electron microscope on their web page. I sent them an official email from my work email account requesting further information. After a couple of replies they finally admitted that they used EnCase software to recover deleted files and had no ability to recover overwritten data. Good old false advertising.
Still, I'm hoping that some day in the very near future I will be proven wrong.
My work will become a lot more interesting if that's the case. The problem with this, though, is that computer tech moves so quickly if you don't get a solution within a decade you can almost forget about it. I've not done any research, but I imagine that hard drive tech is soon to change again to allow for greater capacity in the same form factor. How much further can we push current designs? 600GB? 1TB?
Hmm, I smell more research coming on.
Mind you, I'm just happy that people will actually do some research on this topic and look for evidence. When I first decided to post in this thread I thought it was a rather ironic topic, given the lack of strong evidence and yet the intense strength of the belief in the computer industry.
I get quite a lot of flak from logical "computer nerd" people whom I discuss this with on other forums. It seems to be a belief that is ingrained and very popular. Fair enough too - I mean, it sounds pretty reasonable on the outset and hard drives are almost magical in how they function anyway.
I just find it interesting to discuss it with logical thinkers when all they really have to back up their claims is a belief, rather than any evidence whatsoever. I'm not singling anyone out with this - I shared the belief myself until I actually spent the time to do some research.
During that research I remember seeing an ad on the web from a data recovery franchise with offices all over the globe. They made mention of overwritten data, and even had a picture of an electron microscope on their web page. I sent them an official email from my work email account requesting further information. After a couple of replies they finally admitted that they used EnCase software to recover deleted files and had no ability to recover overwritten data. Good old false advertising.
Still, I'm hoping that some day in the very near future I will be proven wrong.
My work will become a lot more interesting if that's the case. The problem with this, though, is that computer tech moves so quickly if you don't get a solution within a decade you can almost forget about it. I've not done any research, but I imagine that hard drive tech is soon to change again to allow for greater capacity in the same form factor. How much further can we push current designs? 600GB? 1TB?
Hmm, I smell more research coming on.
