what is the difference between deleting and shredding the contents of the recycle bin on the computer?

Answer 1

even if you delte the contents of the recylce bin, they can still be recovere with file recovery software, shredding basically goes one step further in that it writes randoms 1s and zero over the file to be shredded in question to complete destroy any trace data, these then are impossible to recover with file recoverly software

Answer 2

When you "delete" something on a computer, the information is actually still there on the physical media. Imagine your computer is a whiteboard, and a file is a rectangle with "do not erase" written by it, and all the data inside it is the file. "Deleting" is just erasing the "do not delete" sign and the rectangle delineating the data. The computer is basically told "you can use this space for future data."

Shredding, on the other hand, is actually erasing the data so it's really not there anymore. Depending on the particular software used to shred, various techniques are used to make the data hard to get back. Back to the whiteboard example, even if you do erase and rewrite data, it can be possible to still read the old data unless you write over it many times. Same goes for harddrives. If something needs to be really gone, there is good commercial software to delete it Dead.

Answer 3

Just Deleting the contents in your recycle bin DOESN'T actually remove it from the harddrive!!! It's still on there!
But shredding is overwritting (6-8 times) what's deleted so many times that there's no way to recover it back off of the harddrive...

Answer 4

To comment on Marissa's (the first one to answer) answer: Shredding is available with 3rd party software. If you want to do a "shred" in Windows, highlight the file and do a shift-delete. That will make it dissapear forever and will not be in your recycle bin.

Answer 5

click on the Personalization options: Vista Control Panel - Personalization With all the options on the right in the big white emphasized area, it's very easy to miss "Change desktop icons" near the top left: Vista Control Panel - Personalization - Change desktop icons Click on that and you'll get this handy little dialog: Desktop Icon Settings dialog Click the Recycle Bin checkbox as I've highlighted above, click OK, and your Recycle Bin should reappear on the desktop. At least that part is easier than Windows XP.

Answer 6

My computer uses XP and I dont have an option to shred. So are you kidding?

Answer 7

If you delete a document, it is most likely retrievable.
If you shred a document, it's gone.