I would be more inclined to take ErrantX seriously if he said what company he works for, so I could do some investigation. You would think that if they regularly do this sort of thing, they wouldn’t mind a link. The “expensive” prices he quotes actually seem really low. DriveSavers charges more than $1000 to recover data off of a failed hard drive, and they don’t claim to be able to recover overwritten data. Given all of that, I tend to think he is either mistaken (he does say it isn’t really his field), or is lying.
I remember that the c’t, an excellent German computer magazine, around 2005 ran a test with once-zeroed hard-drives: They sent it to a lot of companies to recover the data, but all of them refused to give a quote, saying that the task was impossible.
Most of these companies manage to recover data from technically defect hard-drives after mechanical failures, and it costs several thousand dollars, but none of them were ready to help in case of zeroed out drives.
I would be more inclined to take ErrantX seriously if he said what company he works for, so I could do some investigation. You would think that if they regularly do this sort of thing, they wouldn’t mind a link. The “expensive” prices he quotes actually seem really low. DriveSavers charges more than $1000 to recover data off of a failed hard drive, and they don’t claim to be able to recover overwritten data. Given all of that, I tend to think he is either mistaken (he does say it isn’t really his field), or is lying.
I agree.
I remember that the c’t, an excellent German computer magazine, around 2005 ran a test with once-zeroed hard-drives: They sent it to a lot of companies to recover the data, but all of them refused to give a quote, saying that the task was impossible.
Most of these companies manage to recover data from technically defect hard-drives after mechanical failures, and it costs several thousand dollars, but none of them were ready to help in case of zeroed out drives.
Plus, he says it would take them a month. How could they possibly charge only 1000 for a month of anything, even computer time?