Have you ever thought what happens to the files and data you delete? Where does it go? Is it gone forever?
Deleting is like forgetting about something for humans but how does a computer forget things? Moving files to a trash is just a starting. To prevent accidental deletions a file deleted remains in your trash or recycle bin, in a temporary directory a sort of isolation from the other files on your computer. It can be restored from the trash bin if you wish but If you empty the bin where does the files disappear or go?
Actually a file deleted is not actually deleted it is just marked as EMPTY! The files does not show anywhere on the pc but the fact is that it hasn’t moved out either only the pointers are gone away. Pointers are another type of data on your drive that point to places in memory where the actual file they are referencing can be found. They are like a table of contents which means on most operating systems deleting a file or emptying the trash is like deleting a chapter from a book. It’s like turning to the table of contents and marking it as empty. Like there is nothing here but it actually is there hidden in some sort of way.
Therere special data recovery tools that look through the memory and mark empty data as AVAILABLE. If u get lucky they can even find a file and save it. Bring it back from dead, basically undelete it. So you must be wondering now if the data is not deleted then why don’t you run out of space on your drive. Well those files which are marked as empty are overwritten. Yes OVERWRITTEN!
If you want to delete a file completely without it being recovered back. You will need to overwrite the unwanted file completely. Overwrite it, corrupt it’s data so it’s completely gone once for all. One complete overwrite of that data should be fine but some people do over 30 overwrites but even 30 overwrites might not be enough to completely erase a file because of bad sectors. Now what are bad sectors, they are parts of the drive that devices can’t access beacause of failed transistors or physical damage so an overwrite won’t be able to reach them meaning that any data that was stored there remains there. So if that’s a confidential file and you want to completely get rid of it. You need to destroy that drive physically or maybe burn it.
So if u want to perform a complete delete to a file destroy the drive. I mean literally destroy it burn it or time will do it for you . Scientists believe in billions of years the universe will witness dark era and eventually sun will become big enough to swallow earth as as whole and universe will come to an end that means end to any file, photo even you and actually everything ever created! But that will happen in a very very long time.
TechnophiltsTech 