Recycle Bin -- Where do the files go?

[sher07]

Dear friends:

After you delete the files FROM the Recycle Bin (Emptying the Recycle Bin), where do the files go? That is, are they transferred to a certain temp directory? What happens to them and how can I be sure that they have been permanently deleted from my system?

Thank you in advance.

Benjamin

[twistedcranium]

In Windows, the files deleted (emptied from the recycle bin) are not completely deleted. The file name is appended with some type of special character and is eliminated from the master lookup table. So the file system effectively is tricked into believing the file is gone and that the space taken by the file can be written to with new data when needed.

So until this section of disk space is written to, your deleted file is still recoverable by recovery tools. In fact, there are some cases where law enforcement agencies have been able to get data from 'underneath' re-written data spaces, so it probably isn't really gone until written over top of many times.

Now, to take care of this there are several software tools available out there that 'erase' files/folders. They take a file or folder that you want to erase, and write overtop of its storage location tens of times to render the deleted file unrecoverable.

I won't mention the names of such products for personal reasons, but google 'file erase' and you're almost there.

[Blair]

FYI, it's VERY difficult to completely remove all data from a hard drive, if somebody wants to access it.

Due to recent MIT experiments it's almost impossible to erase data from a hard drive. Not to mention scanning tunneling microscopes.
The onle sure method is complete destruction of the hard drive platters.