quote:I keep forgetting how unerasable our digital traces are...
That's why there are also programs for erasing drives when you want to make sure the data is gone. As far as I know, they write stuff onto the drive repeatedly.
Posts: 3546 | Registered: Jul 2002
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I suspect that our computers weren't reformatted yet because they were Macs and the others were all windows machines. I don't know if they just started with the windows machines and hadn't got to the Macs yet or if they didn't have the software on hand to reformat the Macs. The external drive could have been reformatted in windows, but I guess they just hadn't got to it yet.
Either way, we are very lucky the police found them so fast.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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quote:Originally posted by Shigosei: Rabbit, I'm so glad to hear that your data was intact. And it's pretty impressive what recovery programs can do -- I know someone who managed to recover a fair amount of data from a formatted hard drive using some relatively inexpensive software. So here's hoping your neighbors' stuff can be restored as well.
quote:I keep forgetting how unerasable our digital traces are...
That's why there are also programs for erasing drives when you want to make sure the data is gone. As far as I know, they write stuff onto the drive repeatedly.
Yeah, fully re-writing the hard-disk should to the trick, making sure it's actually trying to write in each possible location.
Posts: 4519 | Registered: Sep 2003
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That is so great! I'm really pleased that you didn't lose your lifetime of work. Time to burn a bunch of DVDs or something. Man, that was so lucky!
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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Glad you were able to get back so much more than you were expecting! I'm sure the feeling of relief exceeds the frustration you must have been feeling days ago.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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Great news! Congratulations for entering the we've been robbed but we got our stuff back club. You know, thieves are pretty terrible people. How can someone look at themselves in the mirror, after having stolen something they knew was valuable even personal to another? Thievery creates trust issues- since anyone known to have been a thief must work extra hard to gain a person's trust. Thievery also causes an inflation on product prices from merchants, since the act of taking something from a store shelf also takes the would-be profits from the merchant, causing the merchant to raise the price all all the other like items to balance things out. They are terrible and selfish people!
Posts: 135 | Registered: Mar 2009
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