Sounds like a certain senior manager also needs their email backups reviewed for naughty business, literal or otherwise.

... major governments of the world discover that when BigHighTechGossipMonster deletes all that personal data that they have been illegally hoarding for the last couple decades, all that really gets deleted is the current working copies. The carefully curated off-site backups live on forever, in all their redundant glory, just as they were designed to do.

I heard a story that the Psion organiser (early PDA) saved data in UVEPROM, ie unerasable while in device. "Deletion" involved flipping the 8th bit in an ASCII code, which was interpreted as not to read the file. This approach relied on the EPROM being much larger than anyone could reasonably fill purely by typing. Apparently the Psion was a favourite of the criminal fraternity who recorded their deals on them. Once apprehended by the police, correctly read, the Psion provided a nice audit trail.

Isn't this essentially the same on MS-DOS based systems? My memory is that they just added a character to the start of a filename so that they were flagged so as not to show up in directory listings but remained until someone sent the command to clear space. I'm fairly sure that the clearing process was (is?) just removing them from the record of what is on the disk (hence the existence of undelete utilities).

Essentially, yes, also the FAT table retained the sector links.

IIRC it changed the first character rather than adding a character (only 8 remember) so to undelete you had to know, or guess, what the first character should be*.

I can't recall the exact details but I was once able to reconstruct a Word temporary file via Norton even though undelete failed. The user, a young student placement, had spent all day typing a document then failed to save it - one of the times IT managed to save the day and prevent a lot of tears.

*I used to work for an Apricot dealer, swapping between PC compatible and Apricot versions of DOS. The latter used A: for the HD so it wasn't unknown to type Format A: on an Apricot then Y followed by "Oh sh*t!" Ctrl-C and Undelete usually sorted it.

I take the view that delete is a hangover from the days of floppy disks and "enormous" hard drives that wouldn't hold one of my photographs.

My projects tend to have a soft delete and perpetual undelete, just because storage is cheaper than lost data. Although that wouldn't be appropriate in a GDPR adjacent application.

Not really a use of my IT skills, but when one of our users reported their laptop had been stolen, I looked up the footage from the nearest camera, which had actually recorded the theft. Unfortunately said thief had long gone, and the room was open to the public for a special event, so we had no access records.

I dutifully phoned 999, reporting the crime. Within a few minutes, I got a call from our local Police station, so offered them access to whatever they needed to solve the crime. Their response? "Here is a crime number. Please investigate the crime, and let us know if you find anything." The user was obviously not impressed, but chuffed when we were able to to claim on the insurance and buy her a new laptop.

We had a visit from the Police at work, asking if they could view our CCTV footage for a particular night as a crime had been committed nearby. Due to the ancient system we had then it wasn't easy to just view it, but I did offer to drop it onto a memory stick, which they were delighted about - promising to collect it in a couple of days.

That's the last we ever saw of them - so obviously it wasn't that important and I wasted my time trying to help!

The most they might have got anyway were times vehicles passed, the cameras didn't cover much beyond our immediate property boundaries and were poor quality.

A previous post of mine:

[1]"You mean that the top secret contents of memory don't get lost when we power off?"

[1] https://forums.theregister.com/forum/2/2017/11/03/on_call/#c_3336077

I wonder what their plan was? Just to nick the cabbage and have a nice vacation, or pull a Steve Miller classic, Billy Jo and Bobby Sue... oh oh take the money and run!

Anon, of course.

Background was a 9BUSD turnover international company, publicly listed. The share, if I recall correctly was tanking to the point, after the facts, I remember it was almost every day claimed to be, depending on whether it was an odd or even day of the month, "the highest rise" or "the highest fall" of the index. LOL. Yes, share value was pure white noise, depending on a single investor's sneeze ...

I was once summoned by top mgmt to investigate the CEO's email, for all backups in the past. A lawyer would come personally to pick up all gathered data.

So I spent one month+ restoring every backup from years before, after rebuilding a mail system (complex feat, the solution was phased out for years).

In the end, I was able to recover a fair share of data (50 %), but nothing was found that I heard of, by the lawyer.

I had the time to briefly look at the emails, and saw this bollocks CEO was spending a fair share of time planning for his kids' career. Not really a surprise the company had done so bad during his 25 years tenure !

Hopefully, the company is now mostly recovered, but this was a scary insight into some dodgy CEO life ... And I've stopped investing in any share ever since.

"You mean," came the horrified question, "when we press delete, the emails don't actually delete, they get saved to backup tape?"

Being a senior manager, you did sign off on implementing this system, you read the documentation, did you understand it??? LOL

Two kinds of people:

those that manage what they do not (want to) understand

those that understand what they don't manage

sometimes supplemented by the third kind:

those that don't manage what they don't understand (but collect big consultancy fees for)

I could have sworn that CEO the 3 rd kind was a film directed/written by Steven Spielberg in the late 70's!

... some forensic auditing at a garage, following parts being ordered from suppliers, to receipt, and booking out to workshop or bodyshop jobs. And then proving that the parts were not for the make/model of vehicle in the workshop/bodyshop. This was then used in the court case of the mid-management employee that was ordering/stealing the parts to order.

The system was old enough that it printed out an audit trail of transactions at the end of each day, so the actual w**k was wading through stacks of printouts taller than the PFY that I was.

Eliminating the impossible! ----------->

And some of those middle managers can really be impossible....

Sorry, just came from the BOFH thread.

So, when they delete something, they want you to send a truck to the off-site storage, load it up with tapes, bring them back on-site, load each tape in turn,track down the file on each backup tape, and remove it, thereby changing history. What's his name, O'Brien?

In a previous job turned up for a shift with a bunch of police that wanted to talk to me - scared the crap out of me.

Turns out, they wanted to listen to a voice recording of a particular line (lots of dealer lines & also some switchboard lines were recorded) and management told that to come to the building and I'd do it but didn't tell me that they were arriving.

These were analogue tapes that had something like 48 lines recorded and the tapes ran for 24 hours at a time.

Anyway, I ran thru a tape over a time period for one particular external line whilst they listened (and obviously I did too).

What transpired was there were some bomb threats being phoned in to reception, in listening to a scratchy recording, could hear a woman in the background and a child, it was one of the managers in the midsts of a mental breakdown phoning in bomb threats. Don't know what actually happened to him in the end. I was asked by the police about what I thought I heard.

Have had to listen in to a bunch of other dealer conversations which included hearing the sex lives of several of the dealers - oops!