Accidental deletion

[Tommy Boy]

I've come across this thread, and now I'm wondering, 'Ok, if these programs restore DELETED files. How do you PERMANENTLY delete them?

You have to overwrite them. What happens when you delete something is it's marked to be overwritten the next time you write to the hard drive. It's not really deleted, just written over the next time you write to the disk. The system sees the marked space and just adds it into the free space on the drive. Thats why if you accidentally delete something, it's very important not to write to the disk again until you recover the data. I've seen this happen with a compact flash memory card, I couldn't recover all the pictures that were deleted because the person took another picture with the camera and the cf card.

Whenever you delete a file its in print is left behind in the shadow memory so you can often retrieve them again, Getdataback can even retrieve some files after a format. the ones you tend to lose are movie files, as they are extremely large. to permanently remove a file you should use something like Eraser.

There is no such thing as shadow memory.

 

[blackjack]

You have to overwrite them. What happens when you delete something is it's marked to be overwritten the next time you write to the hard drive. It's not really deleted, just written over the next time you write to the disk. The system sees the marked space and just adds it into the free space on the drive. Thats why if you accidentally delete something, it's very important not to write to the disk again until you recover the data. I've seen this happen with a compact flash memory card, I couldn't recover all the pictures that were deleted because the person took another picture with the camera and the cf card.


There is no such thing as shadow memory.

There is but it relates to Ram I was getting mixed up with that, technically you are correct you need to continually overwrite something to completely erase it as all that happens when you delete the file is remove the reference to it which contain the place where you will find it.
a simple utility tool will retrieve it unless as you said another file is created over it.

 

[Tommy Boy]

There is but it relates to Ram I was getting mixed up with that, technically you are correct you need to continually overwrite something to completely erase it as all that happens when you delete the file is remove the reference to it which contain the place where you will find it.
a simple utility tool will retrieve it unless as you said another file is created over it.

When you say "shadow memory" are you referring to "virtual memory"? Because I've never heard of shadow memory.

 

[blackjack]

When you say "shadow memory" are you referring to "virtual memory"? Because I've never heard of shadow memory.

shadow memory
A portion of memory that helps make a system faster by sending any requests for the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) to the RAM (random-access memory) shadow for execution instead of searching throughout all of RAM. Also called shadow ROM (read-only memory), shadow RAM, and shadow BIOS ROM

 

[dan7777]

Woah, cool. I had no idea entries were marked to be overwritten. So, that's how harddrives work then? I guess that makes sense, the needless don't have a 'delete' function? Entries are just overwritten?

Also, I guess files are fragmented, so it can take a while for a file to be completely erased?