What is a computer actually doing when it fully deletes a file, and why are some files too big to go into the trash so they have to be “deleted permanently?”
In: Technology
When you say “fully deletes a file”, what do you mean by that (as there’s a few different potential meanings)?
* When a user presses delete, the file is moved to the recycle bin (it’s not actually moved, rather the reference to the file on disc gets moved).
* When a user right-clicks the recycle bin and presses “Empty Recycle Bin”, the reference to the file on the hard drive is deleted and the space the file took up is “marked for deletion”, at this point the file still exists, but not even the recycle bin keeps track of the disk space used by the file anymore and other write operations can overwrite that space (it’s at this point that Windows will “release” the disk space and show as available space on your drive).
* When you secure erase or zero the space used (such as with a “secure file deletion” or full format), the system will overwrite that space multiple times with random data and leave it marked for deletion (secure delete), or will write all zeroes to that space (full format/zero).
Hopefully that answers your deletion questions. As for why some files are too big for the recycle bin – Windows has a default maximum amount of space for the recycle bin. Files larger than that will skip the first option above and go immediately to the second. If your recycle bin is full and you add to it, it’ll automatically perform the second option on the oldest files to make enough space for the most recently deleted files.
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