>Deletion programs do this because it looks cool. It's not necessary - literally noone has ever recovered anything from a zeroed out HD sector. anything of val

>Deletion programs do this because it looks cool. It's not necessary - literally noone has ever recovered anything from a zeroed out HD sector. anything of value From what I recall, with an electron microscope you can detect polarity around the edges of bits for certain magnetic storage devices and I recall seeing a paper where this was stepped through a several bits were recovered with fairly good success rates. This is part of the reason behind the old rationale of overwriting multiple passes. With that said, given current data density for anything useful, reassembling anything remotely useful from such an approach would be nearly impossible and take a huge amount of time. With NAND based storage, none of this applies or at least has entirely different context to consider. Edit, was curious, here's a reference you could follow to the actual paper for empirical backup: https://www.sans.org/blog/overwriting-hard-drive-data/ https://www.sans.org/blog/overwriting-hard-drive-data/