Interestingly enough, many documents have been recovered from Pompeii.
Quick history refresher: Pompeii was an ancient Roman city-town near Naples. When Mount Vesuvius erupted in the year 79, Pompeii was covered in ~15 feet of lava and volcanic ash. One imagines that this was highly distressing to the residents of Pompeii, but none were available for comment as they were all busy being incinerated. I guess we'll never know how they really felt about it.
Then sometime in the 1900s a group of workers were excavating the area for a new project. They had been burning these odd little bits of coal they'd found. Imagine the horror when someone realized the "coal" was actually old manuscripts that had crumpled up into little balls of carbon due to the volcanic eruption. The workers had been burning priceless ancient Roman artifacts!
Researchers were able to mechanically separate some of the manuscripts, and with the aid of modern computer vision systems, we've been able to read some of them. It's quite an amazing story.
So I guess you probably want to spend the extra $20 and spring for the really good incinerator on Amazon. You don't want future historians literally digging through your incriminating financial documents.
During the Oakland Hills Fire[0] fragments of books and newspapers fell from the sky on us in Albany (north-east of Berkeley). Half- and quarter-pages.
It is incredibly easy to ensure that a controlled fire combusts all of its fuel completely. You just add excess oxygen to the combustion chamber.
Uncontrolled fires, and things burning under a blanket of ash, will not have sufficient oxygen in some places, will have CO as a reaction product instead of just CO2, and may leave unburnt carbon. Think about how charcoal is made--oxygen-free pyrolysis.
The waste product of a document incinerator is ash, water, and CO2. It is literally impossible to recover any information content from it.
Quick history refresher: Pompeii was an ancient Roman city-town near Naples. When Mount Vesuvius erupted in the year 79, Pompeii was covered in ~15 feet of lava and volcanic ash. One imagines that this was highly distressing to the residents of Pompeii, but none were available for comment as they were all busy being incinerated. I guess we'll never know how they really felt about it.
Then sometime in the 1900s a group of workers were excavating the area for a new project. They had been burning these odd little bits of coal they'd found. Imagine the horror when someone realized the "coal" was actually old manuscripts that had crumpled up into little balls of carbon due to the volcanic eruption. The workers had been burning priceless ancient Roman artifacts!
Researchers were able to mechanically separate some of the manuscripts, and with the aid of modern computer vision systems, we've been able to read some of them. It's quite an amazing story.
So I guess you probably want to spend the extra $20 and spring for the really good incinerator on Amazon. You don't want future historians literally digging through your incriminating financial documents.