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when erased is not gone



> 71. I have read that a document, or letter, or cookie, or whatever
> that I erase from my files is not really erased, but that it lurks
> somewhere in the bowels of my hard drive.  Is that true?  And if so,
> how can I erase something (an embarrassing letter, for example) so
> that it is really erased;  that is, gone forever?  And not even you
> geeks could ever recover it?
> 
> Hal Richter  
> PC-NERD2@JUNO.COM  (919) 942-4328

Ask Oliver North! He famously said, "I was told that deleting e-mail meant
that it was gone forever." But his e-mail was not gone far. He became
the object of a Congressional probe and later, perhaps in response that
that probe, a hawker of flack jackets.

In Ollie's case, his e-mail had been carefully backed up at regular
intervals and the backups carefully stored.  That is one way that your
embarrassments can be recovered. This assumes that you are storing your
files on a server or on a well-managed network, of course. But then many
of us are in exactly that situation.

In the case of an individual computer not on a network, the files can
still be recovered. When you delete a file (or try to delete one), the
space on your hard drive or floppy is simply marked as available; the
space is not demagnatized so the data remains there until the space is
over-written. 

Normally your software will not allow you to access the spaces marked as
deleted, but some wonderful utilities like Directory Snoop, by Briggs
Softworks (ftp://ftp.ixian.com/pub/ead/), and RecoverNT, by Sunbelt
Software Distribution, Inc. (available at the same site), will help you
and others out. Both are available for free and allow you to recover not
only files in the 'recycle bin' also but files that have actually been
deleted. Directory Snoop has a security feature that will completely wipe
out traces of files for you (or so they say).

Services from companies such as Symantec Data Recovery Service,
DriveSavers and others are designed to help you out when you have a
disaster, say your computer catches fire or you simply have a disk crash,
but they can be used for recovering innocently deleted files as well.

For those seriously interested in complete file removal, I recommend
Arnoud "Galactus" Engelfriet's site at
http://www.stack.nl/~galactus/remailers/index-wipe.html and the Electronic
Privacy Information Center's tool page
http://www.epic.org/privacy/tools.html Both will direct you to even more
options for your personal security and privacy.

Remember what Winston Smith found out far too late, nothing written is
ever quite gone. Or had Winston not yet realized when he made that
discovery that it is good to love Big Brother?