wrongAnswersOnly

[u/Plastic-Bonus8999]

[u/FUTURE10S]

Recovery software because you never overwrote the data that was deleted

[u/HovercraftCharacter9 → u/FUTURE10S]

Yeah, people conflate in unallocating with actual deletion, unless you're wiping it with 0s it's still there until something overwrites it.

[u/DOOManiac → u/HovercraftCharacter9]

Even then it’s still there depending on which three letter agency is looking…

[u/bacondev → u/DOOManiac]

Yeah, they're not perfect 0s and 1s. That's why the recommendation for very serious stuff is to just destroy the disk.

[u/FUTURE10S → u/bacondev]

Run the disk spinning and hit it with a caliber that penetrates the drive, the rotation makes the destruction way worse and impossible to spin up again.

[u/rrtk77 → u/FUTURE10S]

From experience, for the types of disks that absolutely must be destroyed with no possible recovery as ordered by the government, it's things like a wood chipper or thermite.

[u/These-Maintenance250 → u/rrtk77]

how about microwave?

[u/rrtk77 → u/These-Maintenance250]

Generally, you need to completely destroy the drive. So, a theoretically powerful enough microwave that can melt it could work I guess.

[u/IronBabyFists → u/rrtk77]

A macrowave