Exclusive: Secure Data Recovery spills the beans on shocking discovery about second hand data storage.
Data recovery specialist Secure Data Recovery has shared the results of a recovery project that attempted to find out how many files could be recovered from a large number of hard drives (rather than solid state drives or memory cards) exclusively for TechRadar Pro.
The companyy purchased 100 hard drives at random and tried to recover data using reasonable means; for this current exercise, it decided not to invest resources into recovering data from damaged or encrypted secure drives, as many of these cases would have been salvageable.
Secure Data Recovery recovered data from 69 drives with 30 damaged HDDs and only one encrypted drive. None of the drives were hybrid ones (which combines a bit of solid state memory and traditional spinning drives). More than 5.7 million files were recovered although that number was skewed by a single hard drive that contained more than 3.1 million files. The oldest recovered drive was a 2.5-inch Western Digital model from 2004; nearly two thirds of the drives purchased were 3.5-inch models.Totally pure?
The findings highlight a well-known fact: most users don’t have thorough destruction or disposal plans after replacing damaged or obsolete hard drives (e.
