Why does deleting things clear storage even though the pc only can’t find it?
In: Technology
There really isn’t such a thing as “empty space” on a drive. There is only “reserved by X files” or “free to use”. When your drive calculates the remaining free space, it’s simply telling you how much of the drive is unreserved by any particular files. When you delete something from the drive, you remove the drive’s pointer that says “file XYZ is here” and the allocated space that was reserved for that file is now free to be used by something else.
But were you to move the drive head and read the data on the drive at the physical location where that data was written before you’d still read it (that’s how drive recovery works in some aspects, it manually reads every sector of the drive and works backwards to recreate pointers to what was written there before).
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