The Problem:
North Carolina has a public records law that makes just about anything a government agency produces a public record and subject to public records requests. The State Archives of North Carolina is tasked by the legislature to write records retention schedules for agencies so that they may destroy records once they have aged sufficiently, based on the value of the record.
Any record that has not been destroyed is still subject to the law even if the retention period has been met. While it is easy enough to determine whether a paper record has been destroyed or not, the nature of database records makes the issue a little more difficult to pin down.
The law in North Carolina calls for the following standard to be met.
(b) When used in an approved records retention and disposition schedule, the provision that electronic records are to be
destroyed means that the data and metadata are to be overwritten, deleted, and unlinked so the data and metadata may
not be practicably reconstructed.
The Question(s):
Is a DELETE or DROP TABLE command sufficient to make the data “not practicably” reconstructed, or do we need to go further?
How easy is it to retrieve a series of records removed from a database table using a DELETE command?