Re: You can get it back
"Unless they used military grade data removal, the FBI can get it back."
Ah yes, someone's bringing up the the voodoo thoughts about hard drive erasure based on Peter Gutmann's tests back in the 1990s - which were performed on 10MB stepper motor MFM drives with relatively coarse track spacing and the imprecision that steppers have, vs multihundred GB drives fitted with voice coil actuators utilising servo tracking systems and _much_ more advanced error correction techniques.
Perhaps you need to read this (his paper and an epilogue): https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html
To save you the effort, here's the important bit:
" Looking at this from the other point of view, with the ever-increasing data density on disk platters and a corresponding reduction in feature size and use of exotic techniques to record data on the medium, it's unlikely that anything can be recovered from any recent drive except perhaps a single level via basic error-cancelling techniques. In particular the drives in use at the time that this paper was originally written are long since extinct, so the methods that applied specifically to the older, lower-density technology don't apply any more. Conversely, with modern high-density drives, even if you've got 10KB of sensitive data on a drive and can't erase it with 100% certainty, the chances of an adversary being able to find the erased traces of that 10KB in 200GB of other erased traces are close to zero.
Another point that a number of readers seem to have missed is that this paper doesn't present a data-recovery solution but a data-deletion solution. In other words it points out in its problem statement that there is a potential risk, and then the body of the paper explores the means of mitigating that risk."
Biting the hand that feeds IT
