Many people are asking this question. So I thought I would write something about it.
The file does not go anywhere at all. It stays on your drive. At this point many will jump in: the recycle bin — you are not talking about that; where does it go after you clear the recycle bin? What do you think? Are the files destroyed? Or do they vanish somehow? Or fly off into the sky? Not one of those is right. Your file is in fact still on your beloved drive. Once I say that, one group will get quite cross. Come off it, are you joking? If the file is on my drive, does space get freed up? To understand this you have to come on a tour with me. A tour of what? A tour of the world of electronics. So let's go. I am not going to an advanced level here, so that everyone can follow. Your hard drive is basically an electronics product. It is countless digital electronic circuits built on the basis of magnetism or magnetic force. Let me not go into detail about that today, because writing about it would take a huge article of its own. Anyway, hearing ‘digital' you have surely understood that its data consists of 0 and 1. 0 means there is no current, 1 means there is current. Now you may ask: where did current come from out of magnetism? In physics, electricity and magnetic force are the same thing. How they are the same we can discuss another day, insha'Allah. So when you delete a file, the point of your file is removed.
What is a point?
A point is the data by which it is decided which directory a file will sit in. It is called a pointer. Since the point has been removed, that file's data cannot be accessed. So that part of the drive will show as empty, and a new file can be put there. Then if my drive is always full like this, how does it show free space, and how can I put new files in that free space? The plain answer is that those data get replaced. That is, suppose a file's data was ‘01001101‘ and the new file is ‘00001000‘; then ‘00001000‘ will sit in the place of that earlier file. In other words the so-called empty space gets filled this way, and the old so-called empty space disappears. A question still remains, though. So, friend, I turned ‘01001101‘ into ‘00001000‘ — then where did the fellow called ‘01001101‘ disappear to? A matter for thought. But nothing difficult. Put simply: is this gentleman called ‘01001101‘ some physical particle? Certainly not. It is just a signal. Suppose that in place of ‘01001101‘ there were a sack; then you would have to think about where to move the sack to. But a computer and things like it run on electricity. Suppose the switch of the fan in your house was off. That means the value now is ‘0‘. Now you are going to delete ‘0‘ and put in — replace it with — ‘1‘. What do you have to do? Just switch the fan on. That's it. Does any ‘0‘ have to be picked up and thrown outside? Certainly not, because it is just like a signal. Not a physical particle. I hope the concept is clear now.
All right — since our file is not going anywhere, it should be possible to bring a deleted file back, should it not? Is that really so? Keep thinking. I will explain the rest in detail in the second part. I am extremely sleepy. Let me get some sleep. If you want to know something, or have an opinion, say so in the comments. Anyway, in this article I have tried to explain a little. Allah hafiz 😉
Read: Can Deleted Files Be Recovered from a Memory Card or Hard Drive?
