This is an interesting development.

As I understand it, the whisleblower recovered 450g of "deleted" data.

In order to really make sure something is wiped, there's disk erasers that will write random 0's/1's onto a single driver sector 7+ times to make sure the data can't be retrieved. It'll garble and scramble the actual data since a disk can "remember" what was in sector up to 7 writes back.

Just because the disk capacity is 500g, doesn't limit accumulative 450g of "deleted" data, still retrievable from the disk sectors if the drive was never defragged.

If the whistleblower is working from a drive that's sector by sector disk copy, then it's possible he's legit got 450g of data that was previously overwritten.

This is an interesting development.

As I understand it, the whisleblower recovered 450g of "deleted" data.

In order to really make sure something is wiped, there's disk erasers that will write random zeroes onto a single driver sector 7+ times to make sure the data can't be retrieved.

Just because the disk capacity is 500g, doesn't limit accumulative 450g of "deleted" data, still retrievable from the disk sectors.

If the whistleblower is working from a drive image that's sector by sector disk copy, then it's possible he's legit got 450g of data that was previously overwritten.