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
First, you have to understand how files are stored. People think they are stored as a single piece, like a groove on a record album. They aren’t.
They are stored in lots of little pieces all over the drive.
Each piece has a pointer that tells the computer where to find the next piece.
So you start with #1 which points to #2 which goes to #3 and so on. There could be hundreds of little pieces that make up a single file.
When you delete a file, it doesn’t ACTUALLY remove it.
It removes the first pointer, from piece #1 to #2.
After that, the file is invisible to the computer. It can’t find it. It believes the space to be empty.
BUT… The file is still there, in all the little pieces it always was, and it will stay there until the computer over writes the “empty” space with new data.
This is how undelete programs work. They restore that first pointer from piece #1 to piece #2 and the whole file comes back… assuming it wasn’t over-written.
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