Say if the internal storage of your phone were to fill up and you deleted something like a video or game, what is it actually doing to the file in order to take it off the storage and how are new files able to just replace it?
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In a computer there is no such thing as nothing. Everything is 1’s and 0’s. You might thing that “0” represents nothing, but in terms of the information it carries, “0” is the same as “1”, so the computer needs a way of knowing whether some 1s and 0s in some place means something or not. To do this, it basically has a directory of what spots on the disk should be treated as actually having information (e.g. files) and spaces that shouldn’t (e.g. “empty” space).
When you write something new, your computer will look for somewhere in that “empty” space to put it, changing the 1’s and 0’s in that space to make the 1’s and 0’s of whatever it is you’re writing, it will then flag that spot as being a spot that contains information.
When you delete something, you might it should just overwrite what’s there with 0s. But, again. 0’s can be information, too. Rather it simply changes the directory to treat that space as empty so it can be overwritten. But until it is actually overwritten, the original data remains there.
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