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Let's assume I have consumed 100% space of HDD with 3 movies (A,B,C)

Now i have deleted A,B,C and filled 100% space of HDD with movies (D,E,F)

can i recover the files A,B,C from the hard-disk?

PS: I have consumed 100% space of HDD in both the first and second time

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  • All the data gets overwritten and is unrecoverable. So, no you can't. You can only get so lucky if you did a tiny little bit of writes to the disk which in your example (that is filling up to 100%) would still wreck the old data
    – Ashtray
    Sep 4, 2014 at 9:36
  • @PeterHorvath: meh, none of those facts mean anything on their own. This however is a pretty poor question and very theoretical. Besides, I'm sick of quoting the revised version of the guttmann paper ;p
    – Journeyman Geek
    Sep 4, 2014 at 11:23

1 Answer 1

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Such home solutions are based on that the actual data isn't deleted on the disk in most cases, only it will be somehow unreachable. It is the case even after a normal formatting.

But now your data sectors were overwritten.

Practically, you can't restore that, with in-home solutions it is impossible.

There are very costly companies who maybe can restore the data in even overwritten sectors. They have hardware to analyze the remaining magnetic field traces. It is not surely possible, but if it is, it will be very costly. A such data restore always destroy your hard disk, but it weren't your real problem, because from the cost of the data rescue you could buy hundreds of new disks (it costs at least some thousands $). It is probably not your level.

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  • can you name the companies doing such type of recovery?
    – Nandha
    Sep 4, 2014 at 9:03
  • I'm pretty sure reports of such companies are mythical. My understanding is that it's not known whether this is possible on modern hard drives. Sep 4, 2014 at 9:15
  • @Nandha Actually, google is your friend. A company which I know you can find on kurt-datarecovery.com/en , but they are far away. (If you are satisfied with an answer, you could accept or upvote that by clicking on the left side icons).
    – peterh
    Sep 4, 2014 at 9:15
  • @DavidSchwartz In many times even the data recovery from a damaged electronics (but mechanically o.k.) is impossible, because the raw data on the disk contains some type of undocumented coding/encryption. Sometimes it is possible. I mentioned this company only because 1) Nandha asked explicitly for a name 2) from them I can say, that they won't say they can something which they are unable.
    – peterh
    Sep 4, 2014 at 9:18
  • @PeterHorvath They don't claim to be able to recover overwritten data, at least not anywhere I can find. The literature says that it's not known whether this is possible on modern drives. If someone could do it, they could easily prove they could. So that would be very surprising to me. Sep 4, 2014 at 9:19

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