In a tale that seems stranger than fiction, a man's 12-year quest to recover a lost fortune in Bitcoin has come to an abrupt end. James Howells, a British IT worker, has been forced to abandon his search for a hard drive containing 8,000 Bitcoins, worth an astonishing $800 million…
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.
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.
I’m sure those drives were highly specialized and protected like the “black box” data & flight recorders in aircraft. They almost certainly weren’t off the shelf drives from Seagate or Western Digital…
https://bringingcolumbiahome.wordpress.com/2017/03/20/columbias-black-box/
Magnetic tape.
That was Columbia, not Challenger, but if they were still using tape in 2003, they were definitely not using desktop drives in 1986.