It’s my understanding that just about anything is recoverable from an intact hard drive.
In other words, deleting files or overwriting them is pretty much a waste of time if law enforcement has enough time, money, and equipment to tease those files back out again.
It’s also my understanding that smashing a hard drive into dust and little pieces is the only sure method of destroying the data.
Is my understanding of this issue correct?
That is my understanding as well.
Heard that erasing your Google search history merely flags Google to archive it. Yea, you think it’s off your machine but they have preserved it.
You are correct on both points.
However, destroying the whole hard drive is not essential. Opening the case and destroying only the disks is all that is required but the fire has to be REALLY hot to burn the disks. They are metal.
A data recovery company somewhere in the DC area recovered data from a hard drive that had been severely burned in an office fire.
Whenever I retire an old computer I pull the hard drive. A couple of times a year I burn brush on my property and toss any old hard drives that I have into the fire. I guarantee not even the NSA can pull any data off of the small lumps of melted aluminum that I rake out of the ashes the next day.