I think Larry makes a number of good points. The key thing for me and that
some of you may not be aware of is that many solutions don't *do*
forensically unrecoverable deletion. I don't think DoD 5015 requires it for
Chapter 2 compliance (though I'm certain I will be corrected if it does :)
). And as Larry noted, if you save something to a WORM-type disk, e.g.
DVD-R, there is no way to do that except to segregate different retention
stuff and destroy the entire disk at the end of it. And even that has issues
if only some of the stuff on a given disk gets put under litigation hold.
Deleting pointers today is a bit more than simply stripping the covers off
the books (the old analogy) primarily because of the volume involved. The
library is orders of magnitude larger such that deleting the pointers does
render information inaccessible to the point of non-recoverability without
using specialized forensic tools.

So consider this: The technology has existed for a number of years to
recover shredded documents. Clearly it's easier if it's coarse strip-shred
compared to confetti, but nobody makes the case that you should have to
pulverize, macerate, or incinerate your paper in order to ensure that it
cannot be produced for discovery.  There simply is no reason that something
that's been shredded should need to be produced for discovery as long as
there is no destruction of evidence involved and the appropriate records
policy and procedures have all been followed.

Same thing here with deletion of electronic files. Now, that's not to say
that something in the Recycle Bin or the Deleted Items folder in the Outlook
Inbox is necessarily off-limits; that's why the distinction is often made
between "accessible" and "inaccessible", and those two are clearly quite
accessible. But something that's been deleted from a database, with the
pointers removed, such that the ONLY realistic way to get it back is to do
forensic recovery, should be considered inaccessible and non-producible
without evidence of spoliation.

Did I mention I'm not a lawyer? :)

-- 
Regards,

Jesse Wilkins
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blog: http://informata.blogspot.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/jessewilkins

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