Why does installing a game/program sometimes take several hours, but uninstalling usually take no more than a few minutes?
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Copying a file to a computer means having to write a bunch of data to a disk — many, perhaps billions, of bytes are read then written back out again. Deleting data involves, effectively, just deleting the file’s name, something that requires writing just a trivial amount of data (a few dozen bytes).
Most people don’t realize that “deleting a file” typically leaves the data there without actually deleting it. The disk has a thing called a directory, which is just a list of files, their names, and where on the disk the file’s data is stored. When you delete a file, it simply removes the name from the list so the file is not found and its space isn’t considered in use any more. In older Microsoft disk formats, it actually just changed the first letter of the filename to mark it as deleted. You can find software that will find those “deleted” files if they haven’t been written over by something else, and “recover” them by finding the chunk of data and giving it a name.
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