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My thoughts exactly, but here's a question for you tech people:
We've all watched tv forensic crime shows where someone tries to delete damaging evidence from their computer. On these shows, the narrator explains how when you 'delete' something from a computer, the data is just moved somewhere else. It does not disappear. Hell, I've even seen an episode where the hard drive was dumped in a pond and they were able to retrieve the original data.
I've read where the Dominion machines have an image record of the original scanned ballot, but election officials have deleted the images from the machine. Could it be that these images can be recovered just like we have seen on the crime tv shows with deleted files on a computer?
Any deletion is probably barred by law and criminal.
I believe the data is ‘logically’ deleted but is still physically there.
Not correct. When a “file” on computer’s storage medium (such as hard disk) is deleted, it is simply marked with a “deleted” stamp. Then that file becomes inaccessible to Windows Explorer. So the data in that file is alive.
However when additional activity is performed by the computer, it can OVER_WRITE on the space occupied by the deleted file. When that happens, it is almost impossible to recover the data from the deleted file.
There are also Apps available, such as Norton Commander, which can clean out all blank and deleted space on hard disk by over-writing many repeats of zeroes on that space. That is similar to bleach-pitting the deleted data.
We’ve all watched tv forensic crime shows where someone tries to delete damaging evidence from their computer. On these shows, the narrator explains how when you ‘delete’ something from a computer, the data is just moved somewhere else. It does not disappear.
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Typically, when you delete a file on a computer, it isn’t actually moved anywhere, but the file location is removed from the computer’s directory structure.
Over time, the computer may overwrite some or all of the “deleted” file as that part of the disk was marked as unused.
A secure erase can be used, at least with older-style magnetic hard drives, where prior to the removal of the file name from the directory, a series of zeroes or random digits is overwritten on the file itself. However, even with that erasure method, it is possible to still recover the erased data. It is just much more difficult.
“On these shows, the narrator explains how when you ‘delete’ something from a computer, the data is just moved somewhere else.”
It seems that this pretty much is unique to personal computers. When you’re the bad guys creating the software, you’re savvy enough to build in a feature to actually delete forever — poof!! (Not sure; my opinion.)
most computer operating system delete function only delete the index of the file. There might be some exceptions. A reformat of a hard drive will erase everything. There used to be a clean up where files were repacked to free up un-used space by taking bits of the actual file and re-writing them them contiguously. This is done now behind the scenes on some operating systems so the files might not be intact after a period of continued use. And there are programs that will read the contents of the drive without the index.