What happens to a file once you press Delete

If you choose not to mess around with your Windows operating system, then the file automatically goes to the Recycle Bin. If you ever decide you still need the file, you can simply search your trash (a fun concept Microsoft gets us through) and you’ll find your deleted file intact and easily recoverable. However, if you disable the Recycle Bin, things will be slightly different.

Most of us consider deleting a permanent file. After all, you can’t see it in the directory structure, so it’s definitely not there. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at the situation) when it comes to computers, seeing is not necessarily a premise for believing. A file is not permanently destroyed and eradicated from your memory simply by deleting it from the directory structure. Instead, it is kept safe in a free memory area, stored in case you change your mind and need to retrieve your file. What is removed is the link to the file, so if you compare a file to a book page, removing the file does not remove the page from the book, it removes the page’s index from the table of contents , represented by the file system here.

Still, your hard drive space isn’t infinite, so eventually the space your deleted files are piling up on will fill up and no more “cupboard” space will be available. What the operating system does in such a case is to overwrite the old deleted files with newer deleted files, so there is a certain time limit in which you can recover the lost data. For example, if you deleted a file from your hard drive a year ago, the chances are slim that you’ll find it intact in the “closet” area. Instead, if you deleted it yesterday, there is no chance of it being overwritten.

Of course, data recovery techniques have been constantly improving and specialists can now recover data even after it has been overwritten. Some companies boast of the fact that they can recreate files that have been deleted and subsequently overwritten in the lost memory sector up to 10 times. However, after 10 overwrites, it is very likely that the data that is recovered is not completely intact and some parts are missing.

Just like there are programs that help you recover deleted data, there are others that help you delete it permanently! Sometimes you’ll want to permanently destroy some data you stored on your PC and your closest resemblance to a paper shredder is a data erasure tool. As data recovery technology is constantly on the rise, there’s a chance that bits of your “permanently deleted” data could still be found, so it’s best not to fully count on that if you really don’t want someone to find out. what you stored on your hard drive.