I wonder where the files go after you delete them out of your PC?

Pointless but I'v always wondered this?

Most of them are actually still there, at the very least bits and pieces, until that part of the HDD just happens to be written on again, or formatted.

Correct above post. The files that are deleted on your HDD are still there, Just the HDD marks the space where them files are as free. When something is writtin to the HDD that space will be avalable to save data, When it saves data the old data is just overwrittin, So you dont ever therotically delete somethng.

it just tells the computer that those data blocks can be now used for other things.

Does no-one Google for anything anymore? I mean, seriously... Just searching for "What happens to deleted files" brought up this simple-enough explanation.

Duh, binary heaven.

Google for president!

Is there a google smily btw?

Anyway, thanks for the info, wondered about the same.
So it`s also possible to, for advanced computer people to restore deleted files?

Quote from The Very End :

Google for president!

Is there a google smily btw?

Anyway, thanks for the info, wondered about the same.
So it`s also possible to, for advanced computer people to restore deleted files?

Yes. It is.

It's possible for complete amateurs to do it as well.

Voila.

thats why the government will hack your hdd to find out if you are a terrorist when you get suspected of it. There are programmes that permantly delete those files tho.

And that name is?
God, I would be stoned to death if anyone actually know what were on my computer...

lol i dunno i've seen one in a shop once tho.

And it costs..something like photoshop right... like 10 000$ ...?

no it was £40

Quote from The Very End :

Is there a google smily btw?

There are programs that simply write to the 'blank' space on your harddrive several times, obliterating any data that was already there.

Norton used to have it on their suite, but there are freeware programs that do the same thing. Me? I can't see the point. If it's that sensitive don't sell the hard drive on, and if it's not illegal then you don't need to worry about having your PC taken by the police to examine.

yh what about people who use stuff like limewire? or utorrent. I don't got a virus from limewire but the police could do you for that. Any way i'd probebly get my pc broken lol if they examined it. knowing my luck it would break lol

Limewire isn't illegal unless you use it for illegal stuff. But the police are too busy catching motorists to bother about people breaking laws (other than driving laws).

But downloading an MP3 once a month of a song you like, or even a copy of Paint Shop Pro every 3 years is unlikely to get the attention of anyone at the moment (except perhaps your ISP, as they check more and more).

It all depends. If a file just got deleted and wasn't yet overwritten then restoring those files is very very easy. Once the file or parts of it have been overwritten though, it becomes much harder to retrieve, requiring professional equipment and knowledge to analyse the magnetic residue on the HD. There are of course also free tools that let you actively delete a file, giving you the option to overwrite the space it occupied with random data multiple times in order to prevent even that from happening (or making it more difficult in orders of magnitude).

How to effectively kill a hard drive....either take it to a scrap yard and get them to pick it up with the big magnet that they use to pick up cars....or give it to Emmy Lou for a week..that kid has killed more Hard Drives and DVD drives than I care to remember!

Quote from AndroidXP :

It all depends. If a file just got deleted and wasn't yet overwritten then restoring those files is very very easy. Once the file or parts of it have been overwritten though, it becomes much harder to retrieve, requiring professional equipment and knowledge to analyse the magnetic residue on the HD. There are of course also free tools that let you actively delete a file, giving you the option to overwrite the space it occupied with random data multiple times in order to prevent even that from happening (or making it more difficult in orders of magnitude).

I don't understand what you mean by "magnetic residue." It seems to me that, if the data are overwitten, then they're gone.

Quote from tristancliffe :

There are programs that simply write to the 'blank' space on your harddrive several times, obliterating any data that was already there.

Actually those programs write random data. If you just write blank (or zeros) it's quite easy to determine what value the bit had before erasing. That becomes a whole lot more difficult when the bit has been treated with random values for a while.
Mind you nothing is never 100% proof, it's incredible what companies like Ibas can do to recover data.

Quote from David33 :

I don't understand what you mean by "magnetic residue." It seems to me that, if the data are overwitten, then they're gone.

No, that's not the case from a technical/mechanical point of view. When you write a 1 bit and then overwrite it with a 0, there is still a bit of the magnetic charge the 1 was stored with left over.

Kinda like this:
At top, it would be 111010111010111
At the bottom, we overwrote everything with 0, but there's still a detectable residue.

Quote from geeman1 :

Actually those programs write random data. If you just write blank (or zeros) it's quite easy to determine what value the bit had before erasing. That becomes a whole lot more difficult when the bit has been treated with random values for a while.
Mind you nothing is never 100% proof, it's incredible what companies like Ibas can do to recover data.

I just wrote that they wrote data to the apparently blank (where the old files were) areas of the drive. I didn't state what they wrote, and you are correct that is is pseudo-random data. It's done several times to cover the magnetic residue Android speaks of, and to eliminate the pseudo-random code from being reverse engineered and used to work out the original data.

It's all very very clever stuff (at the FBI level).

Edit Forget it... Helps if you refresh the page once in... several handfuls of hours.