Your comment prompted me to go in search of something I'd seen several years ago: something about an advertisement in Pompeii for prostitutes, or something like that. Anyway, I couldn't find exactly what I went in search of, but I did stumble upon this oddly specific, yet interesting, Wikipedia entry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erotic_art_in_Pompeii_and_Herc...

Priapus had it goin' on! Reading the Priapeia for the first time is a treat...

> something about an advertisement in Pompeii for prostitutes, or something like that

Maybe something along these lines?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lupanar#Graffiti

That recovery is much easier though, it is using the device as intended.

And of course, rm just unlinks, doesn’t actually delete, so even going a step further and recovering deleted content is hardly magic.

This is more like if, sometime in the future, they somehow successfully reconstructed a snapshot of our computers’ volatile memory by examining the power supply, or something ridiculous like that.

Big if.

We’ll lose a lot of digital data simply because we won’t have the means to read it. CD-readers aren’t manufactured anymore in volume. It’s easy to imagine society in 40 years not having any CD readers handy but having a bunch of CDs they want to read. Now multiply that by all the funny storage formats we’ve created over the years.

I’m almost certain it is impossible to actually do what I said. But then again, I bet anybody 2000 years ago would say the same of reading scrolls that have been consumed by a volcano!

No need for a CD reader if you have a CT scanner and software that converts those ridges into bits. The bigger question is how well preserved those CDs will be.

> rm just unlinks, doesn’t actually delete,

On HDDs. On SSDs it'll lead to now-unusued space getting TRIMed which actually erases the blocks. Back to scraping the papyrus.