Where does the deleted files go ? How does the data recovery tools work ?

In this technically modern world our life revolves around P.Cs, smartphones, smartwatches etc. Most of the information today is stored in digital format be it photos, videos, books, documents and any other thing you can think of. We all rely on storage devices to store our data but data loss on these devices is common, it can be due to accidental file deletion, hard drive failure or data corrupt. But what actually happens when you delete a file, lets find out -

When you first press the delete button your file goes to Recycle Bin(or Trash), in other words consider recycle bin as a folder where you keep all your junk and unused files, so deleting the file is just like moving that file from one folder to another. The next option you have is to empty the Recycle Bin i.e. permanently deleting the file. You might be surprised to know that even after permanent deletion your file doesn't go anywhere it remains on the disk. What actually happens is that the path to locate that file on the disk is erased, but the zeros and ones (binary) that make up the file still remains on the disk and the space allocated to that file free up to be used by other files. When you add a new file either it can take the already empty slots on your disk or it can overwrite on the file you deleted. You can recover your deleted file until it has not been overwritten.

But what if you have some sensitive data and you don't want it to be recovered by anyone. There are many tools such as Eraser, CCleaner which help you to do so. So how do these work? Most of these tools works on the Zero Filing Method. First they delete the file to free up the space on the disk then they overwrite all the ones with all the zeros. Hence the file becomes almost impossible to be recovered.

How data recovery tools work -

The file you deleted can be present on your disk for over an year or it might be replaced by another file after a few minutes only. The data recovery tools consist of complex algorithms which search your disk to find the location of the deleted file. The possibility of file recovery depends on the format of file system too. Windows NTFS system retains some information after deletion, making it easy to recover but the UTF and FAT systems destroy most of their information which make their recovery difficult.

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