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Post by: AC360 Filed under: Kyung Lah • Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 |
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Info on deleting a file on a hard drive for those who may be interested,
When the file is saved it is written on the drive in chunks called sectors. These chunks are then given a series of ones and zeros that represents the information you are saving.The larger the file the more chunks it is saved in. At the same time the file name along with the location of the chunks is saved in a special section of the drive called the file allocation table or fat. This tells the computer where to find the file and where there is empty space that new files can be saved. To read the file the computer looks up the file name in the FAT and then reads all the ones and zeros in all the chunks, and your file is opened. If you erase the file by dragging it to the trash or pushing delete the system just changes the first letter in the file name to a special character that tells the computer that the file is deleted and it can reuse all the chunks that the file was saved in. The ones anz zeros are all in the same order and the file is still there. With special software you can see the file name and all the data of this file. As you save more files the chunks that held this file slowly get reused and new ons and zeros replace the old ones and you slowly lose the data. If you want to really delete the file there is special software tha you can use. This software will taks all the chunks that held yoour file and write all zeros or all ones on all of them. For further security it might over write the sectors several times. Once this happens the file is truly erased. There are very special things that can be done to look for "Shadows" of old files but that is very difficult. If any one could do this the US government would be the ones who could.