Question:
All my accounts were on a partition of my Hard Drive which I've overwritten
with something else, completely. Is it still worth while sending it to a
data collection agency in the hope that they might have the technology to
recover it. I've heard that there are techniques that can recover files over
written by another file because the intensity of the 1 and 0 bits are
different.
Answer:
The likelihood of the results turning out particularly well are
vanishingly low.
You may see reports in _Popular Science_ indicating that "they" can
get signals off disk drives that people tried to erase. Reality is
that that sort of analysis requires incredible amounts of effort per
byte.
If you want to imagine getting such analysis done, I'd suggest you
take out the disk drive and not write to it again. If this drive is
on the computer you're using to read news, then everything you do that
involves having that disk powered up worsens the chances of recovery.
