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 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.