Deleted files: Gone but Not Forgotten

When you “delete” files they’re not really deleted and they’re not taking up space either. It’s sort of like they’re in purgatory.

Think of your hard drive as a chalk board. When you erase a chalk board, you can’t see what you erased (very well) but somewhere in the slate of the chalk board is everything you’ve ever written on it. But still you can write something new on it. So it is with your hard drive.

When you “delete” a file, you’re telling Windows that you don’t want that file anymore and instructing Windows to use the space that file once occupied for something else. So Windows shows the space once occupied by that file as “available” which we refer to as free space. If you have free space available on your hard drive you can install a new program or use the space freed when you deleted a file or program

However, way down deep on the magnetic surface of your hard drive the file that you deleted is still there. That’s how the FBI and other authorities gather evidence against criminals who think by deleting or formatting their hard drives they can erase all the incriminating evidence it might contain. But there is software available that can capture the faintest particles of deleted files and restore them. There is hardware available that can even extract almost all data from “formatted” hard drives.

If you want to try recovering some deleted files from your hard drive so you can see how deleted doesn’t mean erased, use a program like Recuva to find and restore deleted files from your hard drive. Recuva is free and not nearly as powerful as the forensic software used by authorities, but once you see how many deleted files you can recover by using Recuva you will quickly see that deleting a file does not erase it.

Now if you deleted something in the real world, you’d never get it back. In the cyberworld, deleted doesn’t mean erased. Remember that!