Talk of The Villages Florida - View Single Post - Safest way to dispose of non-bootable laptops?
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Old 07-11-2024, 01:33 PM
PoolBrews PoolBrews is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by LeRoySmith View Post
One of my booger eater buddies told me a 'delete' or 'erase' just changed the first character of a packet with a wild card, if you go put the correct character back the data could be recovered. Is that accurate, or at least directionally correct?
Yes, a simple delete or erase doesn't actually delete the data, it just changes the header for the data so that the file doesn't show up to the OS, and the space on the drive is available for use. If the OS allocates that space and writes data, then the previous data is unrecoverable.

That is why I clear state that you need to do a full wipe which includes overwriting the entire drive with random 1's and 0's.

A normal format does not overwrite the data, a wipe does.