What happens to the files on your computer when you “empty the recycle bin”?
In: Technology
Normally a file on your computer can be divided into two parts.
One is the actual file contents, a large blob of stored data somewhere.
The second is an entry in an index of what files exist. That has data to point to the file contents.
When you delete a file to the recycle bin, all you do is set a flag on that index to say it is soft-deleted. The contents still exist on the disk.
When you hard delete a file, all you do is actually completely delete that index entry. The data is actually still on the disk. However, now when some other application asks for space on the disk to write a file, the OS will tell them that the space is free, so they can overwrite it.
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