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You just selected a file and deleted it on purpose. Great, no one will ever be able to retrieve it. Well, sorry to disappoint you, but that cannot be furthest from the truth. Ever wonder what happens to files when you delete them, be it by mistake or on purpose?

The only thing that happens when you press that delete button is that the file(s) is sent to the computer’s recycle bin or trashcan. Therefore, in order to complete the process, you must open up the recycle bin, highlight all files that you want to really get rid of, and then either hit the ‘delete’ key on the keyboard or right click on the file and then left click on ‘delete’ from the drop down list. Some systems also have an option whereby you can simply right click on the trash icon

and select delete trash. For the commoner, the file is then considered "deleted".

However, for those who are familiar with “computer biology",   the file is actually still in the system and you have really only begun the deletion process. This is good news if you deleted a file by accident. In order to retrieve the file, you simply have to open the recycle bin, select the file you deleted and click on re

store in order to retrieve the deleted file(s)

The reason for this is - when you delete a file from the hard drive, the file still exists there for a short while. What you actually did was simply tell your computer that it can now put new data in the place of the old file and overwrite it. The concept is very similar to recording over VHS tapes with new programs. The old data is still there, even if you don’t want it to be, until it’s been recorded over by new data. Short of putting a great deal of new information into your computer to completely erase all old, deleted data, there is a better solution for completely erasing it.

Reformatting the hard drive is the surest way to completely remove all deleted files and return the space that they were occupying to a blank, empty space. Reformatting rearranges all of the files that are still active on your computer and eliminates even the slightest traces of a delete file(s). Therefore, be sure to back up all the files that you want to keep before reformatting your hard drive. The back-up and reformatting process is often time consuming, and can take several hours, depending on the computer, the size of your hard drive and the amount of data you have. However, it is worth it for those of you who have (or in this case had) sensitive information on the computer that you don’t ever want anyone to retrieve.

If you must keep sensitive information on your computer, make sure to 1) use a high-security password, consisting of numbers and both upper and lower case characters 2) do not use the "remember password" option on your computer and 3) do not reveal your password to anyone

Filed under: General • How-To

Tags: deleted files