"Confidence cannot find a place wherein to rest in safety."
Virgil
The next security issue regarding your deleted files concerns the wonderful technology of file recovery. There are two basic technologies available in this area. The first is the un-erase or undelete software available to the general public. These programs are designed to go in and recover files that you have accidentally deleted. For the most part, these programs are pretty limited in the extent of what they can recover, although some software is better than others.
The second technology is that used for professional data recovery. This technology makes it possible to read data even when it has been overwritten any number of times. Data recovery technology is so sophisticated that it is possible to recover data from disks that have been in fires, under water, and where the disk has been physically damaged. It can also be very expensive, so don’t start abusing your hard drive with the idea that you can always recover your data anyway.
Data recovery works by taking advantage of how electromagnetism works. You probably already know that computers work by using binary code consisting of zeros and ones. The patterns these zeros and ones form is read by your computer and interpreted into letters, numbers, and shapes that you can understand.
In order to store these zeros and ones on your computer, hard drive technology takes advantage of the properties of electromagnetism. Your data is actually stored on your hard drive as highly organized magnetic particles. The read/write head of the disk drive changes the polarity (positive or negative) of these particles, creating organized patterns that form the electromagnetic representation of the zeros and ones that make up the binary code of your data.
If any of the magnetic particles on the drive are destroyed or damaged, the logical patterns of code become lost and your computer is unable to read the data that was written in the damaged area. (This is why you should never place magnets, unshielded speakers, or any other electromagnetic device too close to your computer. They can destroy the magnetic patterns stored on your drive as data.)
There are data recovery techniques available that can work around this problem by reading the residual magnetic charges left from the destroyed particles. This is a sophisticated technology that has developed to the point where original data can be read from drives even when that data has been overwritten a number of times. And this is also how someone can access your data even after you thought it was gone from your hard drive.
You may be thinking right now that
worrying about this level of security is overkill. After all, you
aren’t James Bond. You don’t store state secrets on your
computer. And nobody would go to all that trouble to get information
you might have on your computer. You may be right. But many
businesses do have the type of information that competitors may like
to have. And hackers aren’t always particular about who or
what they go after. You may not be a large corporation, but your
business or personal financial information, bank account numbers,
credit card numbers, or personal information . . . . would you really
like to have these things accessed? The fact remains that there are
a lot of unscrupulous people in the world.
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