Where Do Deleted Files on Your Computer Go?

Most of you reading this post should have at one point or the other questioned where the heck all the files you deleted on your computer went. Did they go into thin or were these files simply forgotten forever by your computer. Well, the solution may not be what you’ve been thinking right along.

When you delete a file, the pc sends it to a temporary directory (Recycle Bin or Trash) where it awaits your final judgment on whether or not you still need to resurrect the file (Restore it) or not. however once you go ahead to delete the file from the Recycle bin (Empty the Trash), the space the said file occupied isn’t really emptied however marked as empty and it’s now available for brand new files to move in.What really happens is that the file hasn’t really moved out, however the pointers to the actual file has been removed making it not possible for your operating system to find the same file. however with recovery tools, you could find those file that were deleted because they still exist on your drive.

Now, once you get new data into your laptop and your OS has no alternative space to place this data, it’s starts overwriting the area marked as empty, and that’s the reason when you restore some deleted files, they could appear corrupt since other files have overwritten some a part of it’s data. thus the key to restoring a perfect file after having being deleted is to perform a recovery shortly when you had deleted it.

Does this Mean You Can’t Actually Delete A File?
Well, not exactly. As you must have now known, deleting a file solely removes pointers to the said file, however the file gets overwritten once new files occupy the area marked as empty. the sole other perfect way to have a file deleted and return a zero file even once instantly recovered using recovery tools is to try and do what's referred to as a “zero filling“.

Zero Filling involves filling each byte of the original file with a “0”, then deleting the file. That way, even if you do restore the data within the file table, all you’re planning to get back is an empty file. It effectively ensures that the disk sectors are already overwritten at the time of deletion.
Now you know what happens when you hit Empty Recycle Bin.