jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

You can recover files on a disc after formatting it. I didn't know this was possible, but I'm not going to try it.

Get Wondershare Recoverit. Now I see what I never tried it. It costs $99 a year.

https://recoverit.wondershare.com/data-recovery-win.html

BebuLamar

Yes if after formatting you don't write anything to the drive then it's possible to completely recover everything.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

I remember something similar in DOS days. There was something you could do to "organize" the drive without wiping data.

Desert Gecko Loc: desert southwest, USA

Experts can go back several formats even if everything has been overwritten. That's why we have bleach bit, and politicians destroying devices.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

That "p" word you used could get this sent to The Attic. Gotta be careful!

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Like an SD card.

dwermske

It really depends on how the drive was formatted. A standard formatting merely clears the directory and leaves the data intact. A secure formatting will not only clear the directory but it will also write zeros or ones over the data. A very secure reformatting will clear the directory and write zeroes or ones over over the data multiple times to make sure the data can't be recovered. The last two formatting techniques take a great deal of time depending on the size of the hard drive but are very effective. I've never seen data recovered from a drive that has been formatted with either of the last two formatting techniques. However, if only the directory has been cleared it is possible to recover the data left on the drive.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

In the Intel services, they “degauss” the drives with a super strong magnetic field which destroys the internals. The navy saws them into pieces and throws them overboard

JBRIII

I was told by a fellow working at NSA that no drive ever left the place. Even computers had the CPU removed.
Also, if you have some types of atomic force scanning microscopes, scan individual atoms, you can still get data off almost any erased drive, so either keep them or physical destroy the platters, etc. Thermite would do a great job.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

When I sold storage (to the NSA among others), we passed through a surcharge on drives from the manufacturer to account for the fact that we couldn’t return drives that failed under warranty.

Laramie Loc: Tempe

A standard format, say FAT32, overwrites the file allocation table (FAT), leaving all data intact. Free software like Recuva could recover everything.

Tools that use the DOD3 standard overwrites every location on disc three times. There could be some information left, as a bit isn't a checkbox, it's an area.

TheShoe Loc: Lacey, WA

Back in the early days of magnetic media, the data was written using very strong magnets. In the late '60s, I saw an intelligence report that said that it was possible to recover data 8 levels deep from magnetic tapes and disks. The disks and tapes were given a phosphorus bath when they were retired. That probably was not necessary for the core memories of computers. Since they were little magnetic tori, it would have been possible to disassemble the memory and all you would have left is an unordered pile of ones and zeroes. You would not be able to tell which was which, or where in the matrix any were located.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

"Overboard" I remember magazine an ad, mor maybe an article, years ago about Seagate hard drives being so bad that they were dumped in the ocean to become artificial reefs. Not serious, of course, but it was a very anti-Seagate article.

Doing a search for that got me nothing, but there might be a new technology coming. "Our advanced engineering team has developed HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording) as the next major step to enable higher-capacity hard drives."

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

At one point in time, Seagate 7200 RPM Barracudas and the 15K RPM Cheetahs in both SCSI and later FibreChannel, were THE high performance drives. Then came the infamous Cheetah 7 FibreChannel drive debacle, and Seagate reportedly took back over a failed million drives (I can’t verify the exact number). After that pain, a large number of customers wouldn’t touch Seagate, and to some extent, there are still those who won’t.

Regarding the new HAMR drives, it’s an attempt to create even larger HDs than 20 TB. These drives are aimed at the large data centers and cloud storage users where both cost/TB, but more importantly, density, are critical. As the size of user data constantly increases, higher density drives allow the capacity of a data center to grow without expanding the footprint of the facility. For the home and small business user, I wouldn’t touch one. Not only new technology, unproven in the long run, but “too many eggs in one basket”. Plus, you have to ask yxourself how you’ll back up and keep a DR copy of a 20TB drive. As image files get larger and larger, selective culling gets even more important, because keeping everything reliably can get very expensive and unwieldy. Just my opinion(s)…

Chillin' Chile Loc: Belleville, ON

I've been getting good results for years with a freeware app called Recuva. Works every time.