[rosser]

AIUI (IANAL, mind), no — or at least it's less likely. It's when you go out of you way to destroy the evidence (and can be demonstrated to have done so) that you're almost certainly facing obstruction charges. If you're just doing the same thing you do every day, it's much harder to establish the intent to destroy inculpatory evidence, which is what would trigger the obstruction charge in the first place.

Second opinion?

[WettowelReactor]

Technically true with one caveat. If you have a reasonable expectation of litigation you are required to put all data destruction on hold. Reasonable can be up to the court to decide and the burden of proving that you did put a litigation hold into place is yours to prove.

[nknight]

In civil cases, once you know or have reasonable cause to suspect a court case is imminent, you're technically supposed to act to preserve evidence, and not doing so can lead to sanctions, even if the evidence was destroyed as part of routine policy.

I'm less clear on how evidence tampering is dealt with in criminal law.

[dkokelley]

In a criminal case (and likely in the worst of criminal cases), the suspect has no idea when the FBI will come bursting through the door to arrest him/her and seize hard drives. A dead-man's switch would be impossible to prevent in this scenario (aside from never using one in the first place).