A study was conducted to see what type of information would be recoverable from used hard drives. 158 hard drives where purchased from Ebay that formerly belonged to organizations like banks and law firms. Of the 158 drives, only 12 had their data destroyed properly and no information could be restored. Of the remaining 146 drives, the data was initially removed by reformatting but thousands of credit cards numbers, individual names, contact information, emails, social security numbers and medical records where recovered despite being reformatted.