Where do the deleted files go

In our day to day basis we delete a file or remove a photo or someone’s face from the picture or our family photo, but “have you ever imagined where do the deleted files go”. Plenty of apps help us to recover the deleted data like ‘Recuva’.


The Google Ingram viewer allows you to search words in about millions of books published between 1500 and 2015 and we can see how the words we see have changed over time. According to an Ingram viewer 1979 was the first year we began to use the word ‘delete’ more often than the word ‘erase’ or biologically we can say ‘forget’.
But how does a computer forget;
The sending of the deleted file to the Recycle Bin is just the beginning to save the files from being accidently deleted , which means the file remains in the computer and we can even restore it from then recycle bin by clicking the right click and selecting the ‘Restore’ button. But the fact is that when we empty then trash we are warned that we cannot undo the action.
“It can be meant that the file originally is not emptied but the physical space acquired by the file gets emptied. It means that the space acquired by the deleted file has been made available for some other file but the file itself hasn’t been moved out from the hard drive, but only the pointers have gone away(pointers are the data in the memory that points you at the file you are searching for)”.
So in the operating systems we use deleting the file and emptying the trash means “deleting the index of a chapter for the book, and marked it as empty” .To the computer reading the table of contents it shows the place which has been emptied but actually the fact is that the data is available there as that we see after opening the chapter content in the book.
Special data recovery tools look through data marked empty available to see what actually there ,if you are lucky they can even find the file, save it and bring it back.
But they fail at times when some of the files are overwritten and are mixed together with other data like some kind of digital data. “The same has been done a couple of years ago with a photographer whose laptop has been stolen by a theft ,The sheriff had later able to find the laptop but the data has been deleted from the hard-drive means the thief has wiped out the data and was using for his own purposes. Data recovery expects were able to find some of his photos but they have been overwritten by the things the thief had done. They have been corrupted , but in a cool way that they can reflect his work, which were later put for the exhibition.”
The above example shows that if you want to delete a file completely that it cannot be recovered in the future so overwrite it and rearrange it with new data’s in a way that the overwrite should be find.
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