Re: Forensic Recovery of Data

From: Alun Jones (alun@texis.com)
Date: 11/15/02 

From: alun@texis.com (Alun Jones)
Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 19:12:08 GMT

In article <20021115125536.07030.00000477@mb-ml.aol.com>,
pcportinc@aol.combatSPAM (PCportinc) wrote:
>so just format the hd and your data is gone forever.

Your naivete is refreshing. Do you also assume that your writing cannot be
discerned from a piece of paper that you've drawn a line through?

Formatting the drive is as simple as writing headers at the start of the
drive, and a small amount of structure information throughout the disk. This
overwrites, essentially, none of your existing data. It would likely take
hours to overwrite the data on most disks. Most format operations don't need
to be so picky, so people would grumble if they took that long. When you
delete a file, or format a disk, minimal work is generally done, unless you
have a specially secured operating system or file system.

Alun.
~~~~

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