What happens to pictures when they are deleted from a phone or laptop?
In: Technology
Most of the time, nothing technically.
Computers have an index of files and where they are stored on the hard drives and memory. When you delete a file, the index is updated and the entry for the file is removed. The file’s data is usually not touched. This is why programs can find files that were deleted; they ignore the index and look directly at the hard drives.
Since the index is updated, the computer thinks the space that has the file’s data is now empty so eventually that space will be overwritten with new files. It’s only when the data is overwritten is when the file is actually deleted and unrecoverable.
Many modern systems can automatically overwrite the data before updating the index. When this happens, the computer will write a bunch of random 1s and 0s where the file’s data was and then remove the entry from the index. This is unrecoverable and you cannot get the file back when doing this.
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