Thread: data recovery.
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Old 27th August 2008
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robbak robbak is offline
Real Name: Robert Backhaus
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The programs ddrescue, testdisk and photorec (part of the testdisk port) are the standard data recovery toolkit. If the data on the disk has not been overwritten, these should recover it for you. But none of these will work if the actual data has been overwritten.

If you have reformated and installed on the disk, you should consider the data overwritten. If you need to recover data from a disk that is in use, you should pull the plug from the system NOW (No, do not shut down cleanly!), connect the drive to another system, and use ddrescue to take an image of the drive to work on. That said, it is almost certainly too late.

However, if you are asking if a determined someone could recover data from that disk (say, for industrial espionage or evidence gathering), you should consider data to remain on the disk until it has been ground into tiny bits, degaussed for hours and mixed into the asphalt when repaving the parking lot. (Yes, actual practice in some highly sensitive establishments!)
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