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Why ‘deleted’ doesn’t mean gone: How police recovered Nancy Guthrie’s doorbell footage
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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Technology
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Flipping the bits on a magnetic medium back and forth doesn’t always flip them entirely. Using more sensitive equipment to read back the bits can see the faint hints of what the bits used to be, which is why multiple overwrites with random information is the only way to be sure (and even then, there are advanced techniques that try to see past all that noise. The more you overwrite, the less sure any of these techniques are to work.
Wild. If anyone knows of a video or demonstration of someone actually looking past the overwritten data on a platter, I'd love to see that - that's really next level csi stuff.