Deleted or Not?

If you delete something on your computer – can you get it back?

Once you delete something on your computer – it hasn’t vanished into thin air. Think of a computer file as a book in a HUGE library. When you delete it, all you’re really doing is getting rid of the card from the card catalog for that book. The actual book, or your data, is still somewhere on the shelf in that library. Finding that book can be tricky though – it often takes an expert or an extraction program to locate it.

Once you’ve deleted a file and emptied the Trash bin – you have given your computer permission to use that space or overwrite that data – but the average person can’t tell if that’s happened or not. Even if it is overwritten, portions of the deleted file can still be recovered in some cases.

Source: Berryhill Inc., Computer Forensics