I'm happy to see any attempts at all to finally put the myth to bed that you can recover overwritten data with exotic tools and techniques but nobody ever seriously believed that you could pull this off with MF microscopy, even assuming the magnetic artifacts which would make this possible existed in the first place. The problem of capturing and stitching together millions of tiny 100um is not exactly trivial and would take years to perform on even a single platter.

The interesting research along these lines is done with a newer technique called Spin-stand microscopy where the platters are imaged with a special read head by installing the entire platter assembly from the original drive in a special device. Although this technique is much faster, more practical, and more accurate than MFM it also completely fails to produce any recoverable bits from overwritten data from modern drives.

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