We’ve talked a lot about recovering deleted files on your Android device, computer or SD card before on this site. While writing these articles, like many of you, the following question came to our mind: If we can restore deleted files, are they really deleted?
If we can get it back, it means that these files are not really deleted. ‘In this case, what happens to the files we delete?’ You may have wondered, so we did. We have explained this subject simply without getting too caught up in technical terms.
First we need to understand one thing: How is data stored on our computers?
Normally, when we delete a data from our computer, it is moved to the trash. If you do not clear the trash for 30 days, the data there will be deleted automatically. So when this process takes place, do the files disappear completely? In order to answer this question, we first need to understand how data is stored on our computers.
There are two types of memory in our computers: volatile (RAM) and auxiliary (ROM) memory. Of these, volatile memory is data that is kept on your device for a short time. As soon as you turn off the power to your computer’s power supply, the data held in RAM disappears.
What we call a ROM is a storage unit such as a USB, DVD or HDD. These are memory formats in which the user can store most of his data. Most ROMs contain ferromagnetic elements, and a ferromagnetic element contains scattered magnetic poles inside.
Data is stored in memory by magnetizing magnetic dipoles in a particular orientation. In this way, the computer can show this permanent data to the user whenever the user needs it.
Let’s come to the main question: What happens when we delete a file?
Contrary to what you might expect, data does not disappear when you delete it. In order to explain this in the simplest way, we can give an example from the PlayStation 2 era. You remember the legendary Memory Cards of PlayStation 2, right?
The size of these Memory Cards could be up to 128 MB, but most of us had to settle for only 8 MB Memory Cards. In this case, we were often overwriting the records of games we had already played and finished in order to save our progress in the games.
This is exactly what happens when you ‘delete’ a file on a digital device. Windows keeps track of all files located on the hard drive. This recording is done with the help of tools known as “pointers”. Each file or folder on the hard disk has a pointer that tells Windows where a particular file is located on the hard disk.
When you trash a file and clear the trash, Windows removes the pointer and changes the file location status to ‘available’. In the operating system, the file will no longer appear on the hard drive, and the sector containing the file is considered free space. New files overwrite the space occupied by this old data.
So how can we recover deleted files then?
Actually, the answer to this question is very simple. As we mentioned, when you delete a file, Windows still keeps it in memory, showing the space it occupies as free space. Of course, this only applies until a new file is overwritten.
If Windows did not overwrite the deleted file with new data, you can easily restore the deleted files. For this reason, many data recovery programs can only restore files that you have deleted recently without any problems.
So to summarize; Other permanent and auxiliary storage units (ROMs) other than volatile memory (RAM) do not magically lose data when deleted because when it saves data, it magnetically processes it to disk. Instead, it considers the space occupied by that data to be empty and overwrites the new data.
In this way, you have the chance to recover files that you have deleted recently.
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