Is there really such a thing as “wiping the server clean”? Short of just destroying the hard drive. Are there not ways to recover information even from a “cleaned” server? Just asking.
Yes, there are ways to destroy the data with out destroying the drive.
Repeated low-level reformatting of the drive might do the trick. But to be a surely sure, one should destroy the drive.
I’d think that by this time the hard drives that held the emails have been destroyed and replaced. Destruction of potential evidence is the best you can do if you can’t get the recipient copies. Sidney Blumenthal might be the key. It will be hard to nail the slime ball.
Actually back during the waning years of the cold war, all classified hard drives were never supposed to see the light of day. They all had to be crushed and destroyed before being tossed. That was also true for any piece of equipment that had permanent memories such as PROMs. The reason being is you can always recover old writes. Takes a lot of work, but the old writes are still there in small pieces of the magnetic storage material. Heck, the Soviets could even read a disk drive from outside a building using radio waves as the drive was in use. So yes, they can recover most of the data, if they really wanted. But we are being governed by crooks who do not care and who are actually protecting Hillary. Otherwise she would have been in jail by now.
If your idea of "wiping" files is to issue a command like "Delete *.*" and expect it to destroy all files, you are in for a big shock. Delete commands tell the operating system to mark the directory (index to disk space used by files) as available. The actual file data is not destroyed until the system needs space to write more file data and writes over the old data. Until that happens the old file is recoverable.
There are "shredder" programs which are designed to overwrite the original data with a pattern like 01010101 then again with 10101010. They may also be set to repeat that process as many times as is deemed necessary (government standards specify the number of repeat cycles).
When finished you may as well reformat the drive for good measure. NOW it is wiped!
Regards,
GtG
Doesn't matter about pressing for access to her server, as any IT person can pull the hard drives and insert new wiped hard drives - a search can't reconstruct data that was never there on new hard drives. The original hard drives are long gone, hidden away or shredded. Swapping out the drives and claiming the server was wiped is still illegal.