David Logue | Engineer
Ontrack

David Logue Data Recovery Manager & Lead Engineer, Ontrack Dave Logue has spent more than 25 years at the intersection of data recovery and data security — recovering what others declare unrecoverable, and verifying that what should be gone truly is. As the Data Recovery Operations Manager and Lead Engineer at Ontrack — the global leader in data recovery and data destruction — Dave has overseen more than 50,000 recovery cases annually, recovering over 120 petabytes of mission-critical data from enterprise SAN, NAS, and RAID environments, including cases that competing firms had already abandoned. His team maintains an 85% success rate on ransomware recovery, one of the highest in the industry. That same forensic depth that makes Dave exceptional at getting data back is precisely what drives his work on the other end of the data lifecycle. As Lead Engineer for Ontrack's Erasure Verification Service, Dave leads the technical process of confirming that sanitization procedures are truly complete — analyzing every sector of a device, including user data areas, bad blocks, and spare pool regions that standard erasure tools routinely miss. His work gives organizations the documented, repeatable proof they need that sensitive data is unrecoverable — critical for regulatory compliance, end-of-life media disposition, and legal defensibility. What makes Dave's perspective uniquely valuable is a combination that is genuinely rare in the storage industry: he is both a licensed attorney (J.D., Mitchell Hamline School of Law) and a senior data recovery and erasure engineer. He understands not just the technical realities of data destruction, but the legal and compliance frameworks — GDPR, HIPAA, and beyond — that make verified erasure a business and regulatory imperative, not merely a best practice. At the Future of Memory and Storage, Dave will present Proving Data Is Gone: Advancing Third-Party Erasure Verification for Next-Generation Magnetic Drives — examining how erasure verification must evolve to keep pace with the increasing complexity and density of modern magnetic storage, and what it truly takes to prove, with legal and technical certainty, that data no longer exists.