What is the difference between shredding a file and deleting a file?

Answer 1

When you delete a file windows removes the first letter of the file name and unassigns the file space where the file resides. The file remains until it is overwritten. This is why file recovery software can find deleted files.

Shredding is a term for the process of systematically overwriting the files space where the deleted file is. The shredding program deletes the file then writes a random series of 0's and 1's over the file space until the file cannot be recovered.

Answer 2

deleting a file is just removing it from the system and is not secure as it can be recover if nothing is overwritten over the sector of the hard disk which it was on before deleting, shredding the file however is the process of deleting then overwriting the sector which the file is stored couple of times to completely wipe the file from the hard disk making it unrecoverable. Shredding is only useful if privacy is of high importance

Answer 3

When you delete a file, you simply tell the operating system to forget that the file was there. It's actually still there until something else is written on the disk where it exists.

When you shred a file, you not only tell the operating system to forget that the file was there, but you overwrite the segment of drive where the file was stored. The more you overwrite the segment, the harder it is to recover enough data to reassemble the file.

Answer 4

Hard drives have two regions: a file table and a data center.

The file table is what maps which files are located where (and whether they are fragmented). The data center is where the actual data is written to.

When you try to access a file, the file table is consulted to find the exact location(s) of the file's contents.

When you delete a file in the traditional manner, what happens is that the file's record is erased from the file table, but the file's data is *not* erased from the data center. Thus, the reference to the data is gone, but the data itself remains on the disk.

File shredding is where the data for the file in the actual data center gets erased as well. Thus the reference for the file is gone, as is the actual data for the file.

Good, free file-shredding utilities exist, like BCWipe (http://www.jetico.com/bcwipe.htm ) and Eraser (http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/ ). It's wise to shred fiels containing sensitive information. It's shocking how much data can be recovered from old discarded hard drives.

Answer 5

A file is stored in the form of pieces in your HDD and every piece has a link at the end of it which tells where the next piece is. When we delete a file, these links are removed but the pieces remain in there locations in the HDD. But Shredding removes all of it.

Answer 6

Well if you delete a file, it will be gone forever.
But if you shred a file, you will have some details or
info left over

Answer 7

What Is Shredding