This Wired article details the recovery operation of data from a hard drive that was on the space shuttle Columbia.
When recovered, it was a chunk of melted metal and plastic, but luckily the platters themeselves were relatively unscathed.
They had been gouged and pitted, but the 340-megabyte drive was only half full, and the damage happened where data had not yet been written.
Edwards attributes that to a lucky twist: The computer was running an ancient operating system, DOS, which does not scatter data all over drives as other approaches do.
It only took the guy 2 days to clean and recover 99% of the data from the drive.
Makes you think… deleted isn’t always deleted, and destroying the drive doesn’t always destroy the data.
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