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Old 08-27-2004, 05:34 PM   #26
Luvian
Ironworks Moderator
 

Join Date: June 27, 2001
Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Age: 44
Posts: 6,766
Quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
Ok. I won't use the drive. I won't erase the new 40gb backup data, I'll just put it aside for now. Again, will it matter that new info is on it? 40gb out of 160gb? I won't touch it further.

I did check the serial, and it is my drive.
Well... you have overwriten 40 gigs of data, but you should be able to get the rest.

I'm no expert, but from what I think I usderstood, when you format or delete a file, the computer don't really remove it. He just flag it as useless data that can be overwriten. Probably something like a 1 or 0 data that say if it can be overwriten or not. So when you delete of format, it just add a 1 instead of a 0, and when people restore them, they replace the 1 by a 0 again, and the data is available again.

I might be wrong, but I think it's something like that.

I also heard that when the government want to investigate a hard drive for some reason, even if the drive has been broken, they can use a device to look at the drive physically and recover the data. I think they said that in the same arcticle I read.
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