North & Co.

[Jules Siegel]

At 08:50 AM 05/2/97 +0100, pclarke at pclarke.compulink.co.uk wrote:

>Apparently they were all deleted by North & Co when the solids hit the air
conditioning, but these guys had never heard of backup tapes...

Don't think so. They had never heard of data recovery and undelete. It takes
quite a while for the data itself to go bye-bye unless specifically written
over with some sort of zap program. In DOS, only the first character in the
address is changed. The data then does not exist as far as the system is
concerned, but it's still there.

Because of the way DOS writes files in segments, pieces of files remain all
over the disk until the space they occuppy is written over. It doesn't write
the whole file in one continuos strip, but begins at the next empty space
and then skips the next written space and so on, keeping notes on where all
the pieces are. That's why you have to run defragment to put them all back
together when they get scattered all over your hard disk. I'm not using the
correct technical terms here, but the description should be accurate. Any
merely competent computer nerd can put most deleted DOS data back together
even after surprisingly lon periods of time have intervened. I imagine this
would be true of other operating systems, too.

Thanks for the tip, though. Turns out that there really isn't much out there
yet. Dale just scoffed at the Internet Joke Book. I may actually be in the
vanguard on this, despite the sneers. We have, so far, some marginally
interesting books, nothing much with even literary pretensions, much less
literary quality. I can hear the jack boots of Aryan Nation cyberpunks
shuffling ominously at my daring to mention literary and quiality in
implicit self-reference.

The investigators just used standard date recovery techniques to find the
supposedly erased information.

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