and with molecular nanotechnology you could go through the whole vitrified brain atom by atom and do the same sort of information-theoretical tricks that people do to recover hard drive information after “erasure” by any means less extreme than a blowtorch...
I think I saw that paper before, either on here or on Hacker News, and it was replied to by someone who claimed to be from a data-recovery service that could and did use electron microscopes to retrieve the info, albeit very expensively.
I would be more inclined to take ErrantX seriously if he said what company he works for, so I could do some investigation. You would think that if they regularly do this sort of thing, they wouldn’t mind a link. The “expensive” prices he quotes actually seem really low. DriveSavers charges more than $1000 to recover data off of a failed hard drive, and they don’t claim to be able to recover overwritten data. Given all of that, I tend to think he is either mistaken (he does say it isn’t really his field), or is lying.
I remember that the c’t, an excellent German computer magazine, around 2005 ran a test with once-zeroed hard-drives: They sent it to a lot of companies to recover the data, but all of them refused to give a quote, saying that the task was impossible.
Most of these companies manage to recover data from technically defect hard-drives after mechanical failures, and it costs several thousand dollars, but none of them were ready to help in case of zeroed out drives.
As far as I know, the idea that there are organizations capable of reading overwritten data off of a hard drive is an urban legend. See http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/overwritten-data-gutmann.html
I think I saw that paper before, either on here or on Hacker News, and it was replied to by someone who claimed to be from a data-recovery service that could and did use electron microscopes to retrieve the info, albeit very expensively.
EDIT: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=511541
I would be more inclined to take ErrantX seriously if he said what company he works for, so I could do some investigation. You would think that if they regularly do this sort of thing, they wouldn’t mind a link. The “expensive” prices he quotes actually seem really low. DriveSavers charges more than $1000 to recover data off of a failed hard drive, and they don’t claim to be able to recover overwritten data. Given all of that, I tend to think he is either mistaken (he does say it isn’t really his field), or is lying.
I agree.
I remember that the c’t, an excellent German computer magazine, around 2005 ran a test with once-zeroed hard-drives: They sent it to a lot of companies to recover the data, but all of them refused to give a quote, saying that the task was impossible.
Most of these companies manage to recover data from technically defect hard-drives after mechanical failures, and it costs several thousand dollars, but none of them were ready to help in case of zeroed out drives.
Plus, he says it would take them a month. How could they possibly charge only 1000 for a month of anything, even computer time?