Cleaning up your disks [LWN.net]

Cleaning up your disks

Posted Mar 25, 2004 10:00 UTC (Thu) by jmshh (guest, #8257)
In reply to: Cleaning up your disks by duck
Parent article: Cleaning up your disks

This is probably due to a too bad price/performance ratio. The data salvage companies often have a flat fee per MB for salvaging, and no, you can't have just the one file you are interested in. So the answer is just "sorry, we can't help"

Reading data off an overwritten disk is not giving real bits, but just probabilities ("this 0 bit has 75% probability of being a 1 in a previous life"). It takes lots of effort, so it is expensive and useful for small data areas only.

Here is a very hypothetical scenario where things are balanced differently:

An AES-256 encrypted partition contains the info where the Iraqi WMDs are hidden => the data is really interesting to a concerned party with lots of resources
A file on another partition contains the key, but was overwritten with zeroes => just a small amount of data to salvage, and even probabilities for bits are helping to reduce the brute force search space to manageable size
The disk gets into the hands of the NSA => the new owner knows how to really do it

(Log in to post comments)