Deleted Files
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. ...continue reading