We used to do free-space scanning on our PDP-11. Disk blocks were not cleared, so you could just open a very large temporary file and look through it.
Actually recovered quite a few people's homework assignments that way. Of course, you could also write to that file, so we had free-space sweepers. And since you could write to that empty space, you could also leave messages, even from the public (100,0) account, which had a zero permanent disk quota (all files deleted on logout).
Actually recovered quite a few people's homework assignments that way. Of course, you could also write to that file, so we had free-space sweepers. And since you could write to that empty space, you could also leave messages, even from the public (100,0) account, which had a zero permanent disk quota (all files deleted on logout).