Also - a darn good question is what the results would be on the same hard drive if they were simply formatted in the copier before they looked at them.
Our State wipes every hard drive clean before they put the old computers out every year at auction. I am not sure why we could not do the same with our copiers plus charge a fee for that service. I have been getting lots of questions on this,and have been telling our customers you can have two options you can buy our security data kit or pay to have the hard drive taken out at the end of service and wiped clean or sold back to you.
Formatting the hard drive may be sufficient to deter someone from trying too hard - especially if they don't know where the copier came from.
It really depends on how the copier formats the hard drive. A 'quick format' simply wipes the data storage structure - the 'roadmap' that describes where all the pieces of each file exist. Data may still be retrievable using an 'unformat' and 'undelete' operation.
For efficiency and speed files that are 'deleted' are usually just marked as free space - so something else can come along and overwrite it.
If the copier does a full format the 'roadmap' is erased and write and verify data is written to the entire data area of the drive to verify that the drive is fully functional.
While there are forensic techniques to retrieve data that has been over-written, once again I would expect this would be a significant enough inconvenience - especially if the origin of the hard drive/copier is unknown.
The 'Data Security Kits' perform multiple over-writes - based on the paranoia levels required.
