[MichaelApproved]

That's assuming the data will still be intact when the drive is recovered.

Edit: I'd guess the odds of the data still being intact are close to zero. A drive is so fragile I doubt it survived. Consider it being thrown around in a garbage truck and then slowly buried under several feet of other trash. Several inches of trash at a time, over time, with trucks rolling over the area each time. Then, consider the weather and other garbage juices drenching the device.

It's a goner...

[kintamanimatt]

Hard drives are fairly robust when unpowered and can take quite heavy shocks and still be fine. The drive itself might be fucked but so long as the platters are in one piece there's a decent hope a good data recovery co could retrieve the data. The danger is it got bent or crushed, and that'd be what I'd guess has happened.

[abrichr]

He could just buy 100 hard drives, install GPS locators in them, and then throw them out once a week. Then he could calculate the probability that the original drive still exists based on how many of the new ones survive. He might even be able to infer something about its location.

[nitrogen]

For millions of pounds, it might be worth using an electron microscope to try to pull the bits off if the platters can be recovered.

[DanBC]

electron microscope have really low odds of recovering anything useful.

At beast it's a speculative attack to be considered in a risk assessment, not a real attack anyone ever actually uses.

I'd welcome any information about people really using electron microscopes to get better than 63% per bit recovery.