But can you trust it?<p>When I returned to JPL after working at Google for a year I was tasked with evaluating a Google Search Appliance.  We ultimately decided not to keep it, and so we had to erase the disks, which now contained sensitive data.  The appliance had a &quot;self-destruct&quot; feature that supposedly erased all the data, but there was no way to verify it.  After lengthy negotiations with Google (some people just have a hard time grasping the idea that just because a file has been deleted doesn&#x27;t mean the data is actually gone) we eventually got them to agree to let us open the enclosure and take out the disks.  Forensic analysis revealed that they had not in fact been erased.<p>Caveat emptor.