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Is it possible to recover overwritten data?
No. It is not possible to recover data that was overwritten.
Why?
The computer memory does not retain any trace of its previous state when it is overwritten.
The secret service must have the technology to do it
No.
- For the flash memory, the technology just does not exist.
- For the magnetic memory (hard drives), the technology is only good to recover the faint sound from an erased cassette player tape,
not from a modern "perpendicular recording" hard drive.
Not even from a legacy "non-perpendicular" IDE drive.
How to confirm the data was overwritten in a particular case?
If the data cannot be recovered by the data recovery software, it should be considered overwritten.
However, you should try several different data recovery tools before giving up because different programs use different recovery techniques and
thus produce different results. There are two typical scenarios:
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A complete format (also called "low level format") was performed on the drive.
In this case, any data recovery utility would show no files at all. ReclaiMe would specifically report that "The drive was subject to a complete format",
confirming the fact that the drive is actually blank.
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One of the secure erase (also known as "disk wiping") utilities was used.
In this case, multiple files, sometimes with random names, can be recovered but they do not contain any useful data.
These files are created and filled with random data by the secure erase utility; this is done specifically to thwart any possible data recovery attempt.
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