Is it true when you delete something it's never really deleted?

Question

I've heard when you delete something, whether a letter from Microsoft word, or you've emptied,your recycle bin, or you've been cruising the internet, and you delete it, clear history, cache, cookies, etc. - that its still on your hard drive and can be retrieved.
Where are these files, if you've deleted them ? Are they located somewhere on the hard drive outside of windows? And yes I did check out adult sites one time, but nothing illegal. But mainly I'm talking about old excel files and word files I deleted permanently. Why can't I find them without special tools. What's a good software for either recovering, or permanently removing these hidden files. Does defrag. get rid of them?

Answer 1

Yes -- they are still there,, to get rid of them you need to format your hard drive, for almost all people this will be great, but those out there that wish to hide it from the government they need special software, which is out there, some free and some not,, but if you wish to hide anything from the regular joes in the world then just format your drive and reinstall,, it will still be there but they will need some good software and the know how to get it,,, we could go on about this for days, there are hackers that can find anything once they get into your pc,, but not everyone is a hacker??? so just re format your drive and unless they have special software and know how , you are safe,, i hope this helps you ,,,,, good luck.

Answer 2

When you delete files, your computer does not change the 1's and 0's that made up the file. It simply deletes the pointers that said, "here, here, here, and here make a file on this hard drive." The computer then knows that those places can be used for another file. When you defrag, it takes files that are stored in several places on the hard drive and puts them all in the same place. If a deleted file was in the place where they put those files, then it has been over-written and is no longer retrievable, period. The same goes for new files. If you create a new file and it overwrites the place where a deleted file used to be, the old file is gone permanently.

Answer 3

Yes, it's true, the files are not actually deleted. They can be recovered, at least for a while until the previously used sectors are overwritten.

When a file is deleted, its record is deleted from the FAT or MFT and the first letter of the file name on its first sector is overwritten but the balance of the file is fully intact. The sectors are freed up to be reused and eventually it will be overwritten by other files.

More importantly, whenever you are on the Web, information on every site you've ever visited is permanently stored in a file named Index.dat in your Temporary Internet Files store, even if you are not caching copies of websites that you visit. It's a system file that is difficult to delete.

Answer 4

They are located on the hard drive where they have always been. All you do when you delete files is tell the OS to forget about where the file was, essentially. So, unless you overwrite that section of your HDD with something else, that data can possibly be recovered.

I haven't used data recovery programs. I can't recommend a good one.

Answer 5

Yes it is true. However, expensive high-powered software is required to retrieve these files. Your not likely to come across these files unless you work for the government or a big corporation. God Bless and Merry Christmas.

Answer 6

Yes!