Is it true that once files are deleted from the recycling bin (or “trash” via Mac), they remain stored somewhere on a hard drive? If so, wouldn’t this still fill up space?
If you can fully delete them, are the files actually destroyed in a sense?
In: Technology
Well, there’s really two sides to this. There’s deleting, and overwriting.
When you delete a file typically the computer just pretends that the space where that file was is blank. This is why you can recover accidentally deleted files, because the data is still physically on the storage medium.
*Overwriting* is actually writing different data over the top of what was there. This makes it *significantly* harder to recovery as the data has been physically changed.
Theres a lot of depth to both of these topics. Typically when trying to completely delete data you’ll want to do an overwrite pass of where that data was using software. There’s a lot of options for this, CCleaner can do it, DBAN, and a bunch of others.
Some programs will let you view bit level data on a storage drive that’ll make this very easy to visualize
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