Is it true that everything that you do on your computer is always stored, whether you delete it or not?

Question

I watch alot of crime shows on Court TV and alot of times they can find out alot of info about that person on his hard-drive; even though he supposingly deleted it.

Answer 1

When a file is deleted from your computer, all that happens is that the directory entry that points to the file is removed. The actual information in the file is still on your computer. That is why it is possible to undelete a file.

However, as soon as the file is deleted, its location is added to a list of "free space". When your computer needs to save another file, it may select that location to save the next file. As soon as a new file is saved to the location, the old file can not be retrieved. How soon a file is overwritten depends on how much free space is available, how often you save files, how large the file is, where the file was located on the hard drive (it always works from the inside out, so free space at the center gets used before fee space at the outer edge) etc. A deleted file may still be there a month later, or it may be overwritten in a matter of minutes.

On the TV shows, they can always recover the data. Otherwise they could not solve the crime and the show would be boring. In real life, you have a 50/50 shot if the recovery is tried within the first 30 minutes. And it drops quickly from there.

Answer 2

In a real sense, yes it remains on the hard drive. There are lots of programs out there to recover data from a hard drive.

There are programs that will write 1's and 0's over the entire hard drive, but many of these usually make you lose everything on your hard drive. An example of this type program is Killdisk.

However, there are programs available that will write over only the data of the files, etc. that you have deleted. I have such a program and it's called Evidence Eliminator. It will rewrite over anything that was deleted with 1's and 0's and leave all your other data, files, program on your hard drive intact. The software was fairly expensive though. I bought it two years ago for $75.

Hope the answers your question.

Answer 3

Yes... Clusters on the hard drive are written as you save your stuff.
Once you delete something, those clusters are not erased. They remain there, but the difference is that they are flagged to be overwritten.

Eventually those clusters will get overwritten by something new you save on your hard drive.

If you want to secure erase, there are some applications that can do this for you, including the famous CCleaner. What this does is overwrite clusters with random data a few times, before they are flagged as "to overwrite"

If you format your drive, it is possible to get all the clusters back, and restore all the data, by reading these flagged clusters, and recovering them.
If you need to format your drive at some point, and you dont want data to be restored, then you should use "secure format" which takes a long time depending on the number of times the clusters are overwritten with nonsense data.

Answer 4

In a word, yes. But you need to highly skilled to find it. I was just fooling around and i found some stuff. But usually it's used in crime-fighting.Plus you have to delete it from the recycle bin.

Answer 5

Yes, it is possible, but the majority of the population is unable to complete such a task.

Crime fighters often have this knowledge along with highly trained individuals such as the people who answer to tech support.

Answer 6

There are things that professionals can do to get things back. What I would like to know is why won't they do it when you lose a file that you need and have to hire somebody for help!!

Answer 7

yeah i heard that to, if that was the case, I've deleted alot of sh!t, wouldn't i notice the memory that was being dedicated those deleted files