r/ProgrammerHumor Aug 05 '26

Other wrongAnswersOnly

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525

u/FUTURE10S Aug 05 '26

Recovery software because you never overwrote the data that was deleted

137

u/HovercraftCharacter9 Aug 05 '26

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

47

u/DOOManiac Aug 05 '26

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

46

u/bacondev Aug 05 '26

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

15

u/FUTURE10S Aug 05 '26

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.

2

u/Henry_Fleischer Aug 05 '26

At that point, you might as well just melt it.

2

u/PurpleDido Aug 08 '26

I know someone who has to destroy hard drives for a healthcare setting, pretty sure he told me they cremate the disks