• Baguette@lemm.ee
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      6 hours ago

      It’s also a futile attempt. In the off chance they even find it, that hard drive would be toast by then. In a landfill, that hard drive would prob be shattered and in pieces, not to mention probably corroded and unreadable.

      • Free_Opinions@feddit.uk
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        2 hours ago

        It’s quite amazing how much data can be recovered from hard drives that have been even in fires. I think they recovered like 95% of the data from the hard drives on the challenger shuttle that blew up.

      • Coreidan@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        Shattered? Very unlikely. Corroded? Maybe, but probably not since hard drives are well sealed.

        They would just need a section of the platter to be readable, they area with the sector that has the data they need. Even if the platter was shattered it would be possible to read the block you need.

        The chances are low but the reward is worth the effort.

        • Baguette@lemm.ee
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          2 hours ago

          I’d wager all the machine compacting and shredding they do at a landfill would render any harddrive broken. Maybe it survived, but after all these years, I highly doubt it survived being expoded to the elements anyways

        • skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de
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          4 hours ago

          Hard drives, except for helium-filled ones, actually have an air hole in them with a filter attached to it so they can keep enough air in the drive so the heads can properly fly over the disk surface. Completely possible that moisture ingress would be an issue after years of sitting in a landfill in who knows what. It is a darn tiny hole though.

    • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
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      5 hours ago

      I feel like this is an argument of Expected Value.

      Ex. if the harddrive has $X on it, and there’s a Y% chance of finding it over the course of a lifetime, then the expected value of the search is X*Y). But if Y is so low that it would take 10 lifetimes to have a better than 50% chance (we’ll say a 6.5% chance if you searched your whole life), it doesn’t matter if X is $742 million (so that the Expected Value is about $50 million) or $742 billion, it’s still objectively a waste of a life.

  • dan1101@lemm.ee
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    10 hours ago

    If he had just bought more Bitcoin right then instead of spending all the time and money fighting this then he’d probably be wealthy now.

  • NegentropicBoy@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    12 Years Ago:

    “What are you guys all doing?”, “Looking for millions stored on a hard drive.”

    Grabs metal detector, finds hard drive, wonders if should tell anyone…

  • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    11 hours ago

    lol lmao even

    When I lost that $5 bitcoin someone tipped me on reddit in 2011 or so, I didn’t cry about it because I’m not a whiner like this guy.

    Also it was because I formatted my machine and forgot to back up my wallet since it was my first one, so not as easy to restore especially with the limited knowledge I had at the time.

    Just think about all the man hours that could have been dedicated to anything more useful than this waste of time.