Spun Down

I failed.

As someone says in the comments, standard quick formatting a drive (especially on a spinning rust hard drive) doesnโ€™t delete any data. It just says โ€œthis drive is now emptyโ€ but doesnโ€™t do more than that.

Iโ€™ve recovered files for friends from formatted drives, without a single file being lost. Itโ€™s not even hard. Formatting a drive does nothing substantive. Itโ€™s like if you wrote on the outside of a full file cabinet โ€œthis cabinet is empty.โ€