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 “fully delete” a file, the computer doesn’t automatically and instantly do anything – it just tells the hard drive “hey you can write over that old data with new data if you need to”. That’s why it’s possible in some cases to recover “deleted” files, because… the file’s still there until something else comes along and takes its place.
As far as the files being too big, that’s just an artificial limitation put on the Recycling Bin in Windows. They assume that if you delete a single Word document that you might need to easily recover that later, but if you are deleting a 500 MB installation file for something, you’ll probably need that space *sooner* rather than later and you probably *don’t* need that file again.
You can actually adjust the recycle bin’s limit to be bigger or smaller as you want. Making it bigger just means you won’t have as much free space on your hard drive when you *recycle* files until you actually manually empty the recycle bin, though.
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