datarecoveryengineer

No, I think that you can still repair the relationship if you're open with her about how you feel. Maybe cook her a meal or something and have a long talk. It's not totally done for.

As for the Micro SD, I can't answer that without seeing it. I can say that a crack in the plastic doesn't mean a crack in the actual chip, even if it's not reading. Most likely the flexing has caused a disconnection of the copper contacts from the PCB inside. I would say that recovery chances are very high if that's the case, but again, I'd have to see it.

It's a fun question. On the physical side, you can open up your hard drive and scratch the magnetic material off of the platters. Drill holes through it, hit it with a blowtorch, or shatter the platters (if they're made of glass). Don't just rip off the electronics, that does nothing.

If you don't want to go that far, you can do a DOD (stands for the Department of Defense's standards) wipe. There are tons of utilities that do this. It overwrites the data on your drive with various patterns of 1s and 0s. Realistically, any data recovery provider won't be able to get anything after one full wipe with a random pattern. The random pattern will guard against future technologies that could amplify the magnetic signal to figure out what used to be a 1 and what used to be a 0.

Technically, you don't need multiple passes, but the biggest issue with secure deletion tools is that software isn't perfect. With that in mind, I'd advise doing at least three passes.

EDIT: There's a good reply below on how I'm off with my DOD terminology. I don't really perform many secure wipes, but I'd recommend reading it if you're interested.

That's not too pedantic, I made a mistake. Thanks for the well-written response.

If you're sure you actually zeroed it out? We wouldn't have a chance, and neither would any other company regardless of what they say.

In order to recover the data, you'd need to magnify the signal to an extraordinary degree, and that technology doesn't really exist. That's not to say that it won't exist in the future, though.

EDIT: But OK, just to play the game, how would I go about it? I would recommend to the CEO that we get a $2 million dollar deposit with no guarantee of recovery. Then we would hire a team of geologists to use an electron microscope to determine the previous state of each bit. 10 years later, we’ll have your data copied to your virtual block chain drive (bitcoin-based technology that will be invented by then).

I've got a conflict of interest here, since we currently sell software. Because of that, I'm going to respectfully avoid recommending a specific tool, although I'm sure someone else in this thread will give you a recommendation and I'll be happy to confirm or deny whether the program's capable of this type of recovery.

Honestly, most commercial data recovery programs will work, but make sure the program's designed for your file system. Read the reviews, too.

This should be obvious, but we see it all the time -- don't install the program to the drive with the deleted data. You'll need to access it with another computer, and you'll want to recover the data to another drive. Your software should only be accessing the formatted drive, not writing anything to it.

This is probably a very simple recovery, though, depending on your drive's file system.