Thanks for some sense Shunter.
From Kroll
"One of the most common reasons people send their disks to Kroll Ontrack is because they have reformatted a drive without realising that there's essential information on there.
While it doesn't have the facilities to resurrect data from a drive that has been zeroed out - had information rewritten over every sector - most people don't do this when erasing hard disks, so Kroll Ontrack can simply ignore the missing directory that gets trashed during a standard format and examine the contents of the disk sector by sector."
From OnTrack
"Physically destroying the hard drive is the best way to make sure the data is gone for good.
Fortunately, there are other safe ways to ensure data is securely erased. Data-erasing software products will overwrite data, with a single pass usually being sufficient. Military norms, however, require that a drive be overwritten several times.
In these circumstances, even Ontrack’s data recovery engineers would be unable to recover useful data. The cost to attempt such a recovery would also be tremendous.
Data-erasing software products also provide a better way of wiping out data than carrying out a low level format. Not only are they more user-friendly, but they also are more reliable. Low level formatting tools will zero-out every sector of the drive once, while with data-erasing products such as DataEraser™3 you can define a number of overwrite passes (from one to ninety-nine) and select the overwrite pattern."
Mac
