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This question is prompted by all this business with Hillary Clinton and her email controversy. But, I can't seem to get a straight answer. It is or it is not possible for a person to completely delete and destroy all contents of one's old emails? Can someone please explain, without too much computer and technical jargon? Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 03:49, 19 August 2015 (UTC)
Opinions are one thing, evidence matters more. While we can't be sure what intelligence agencies are capable of, there's no evidence so far that anyone has publicly demonstrated the capability of recovering data from a singly overwritten hard disk. Even from a theoretical stand point, most people who argue it's possibly appear to be relying on a nearly 20 year old paper (written from a theoretical standpoint) which they've often misunderstood, which even the author of has said probably is irrelevant to modern hard disks.
(Now properly overwriting the disk can be easy to screw up. In particular, reallocated sectors are tricky. But even if you're unlucky enough to have reallocated sectors, they won't have much data, I'm not sure whether even complicated criminal investigations bother to try and recover from them. Probably your best bet is to use Secure Erase, and make sure it finishes.)
However this isn't particularly relevant to Clinton because she didn't AFAIK even try to erase the hard disk, instead simply set the server to "delete" emails after 60 days. Even if she had also erased all empty and slack space, which I'm pretty sure she didn't, it's still possible that there is data in in some allocated part of the disk, e.g. the page or swap file, automatic backups. And that presumes the mail server actually deleted the emails, I know some e-mail clients only dereference emails when deleted, and don't actually remove them from the database/file until after they reach a certain percentage. I presume some email servers do likewise.
Note however, recovering a small number of emails may not be particularly interesting. It's not like she denies it was an email server. Unless you believe a large percentage of the emails she didn't hand over, should have been handed over, just finding a few would probably just be boring.
Thanks, all. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 02:37, 23 August 2015 (UTC)