How is a deleted file overwritten?

Question

If it is 6 months ago, with 3 sims 2 games installed, downloaded songs, I also use d**k clean up, ccleaner, and defragment. Would my old picture and video files I deleted 6 months ago still be on there?

Answer 1

the answer is possibly - Windows does not delete files but instead makes them unreadable in Windows itself. If the space is available then Windows will write new data over the old location, but if you cleared a lot of data and for example some pictures were at the end of the drive, currently you dont have a lot of data then the old spaces may not yet be overwritten by new data so could be recoverable with the right software.

What you need is a secure deletion program try this one but be careful how you use, once this program deletes a file it is gone. It works on anything from W95 to Vista and will allow you to wipe the free space on your Hard Drive. If you want to format the drive it will completely overwrite every single byte of space but does take a while to complete. Both 32 bit and 64 bit versions are available here  http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles... group_id=37015&package_id=65323&release_...

Answer 2

If you've been using and defragging the computer for 6 months, about the only hope (and there's no guaranty) would be forensic recovery, and unless the old files are worth a lot of money (a lot - pounds and pounds of large bills), it'll cost more to recover the files than they're worth.  (At least many thousands of dollars.)

If you're lucky enough that the files are recoverable by normal means (with a program like Recuva) start buying lottery tickets and placing bets on anything.

Answer 3

technically no but there are places that specialize in data recovery that could probably get them back.

Answer 4

i think you won't really know, unless you run a recovery software like active undelete. if you scan your drive and cannot recover your pictures then it means that you already over written them.

Answer 5

A deleted file is not overwritten as part of the deletion process.  Without getting too technical, I'll try to explain file storage.

If you store a photo on the disk, what happens is the data is written to the disk in areas that are listed as "available" for storage.  An entry is mage into a table on the disk to show the file name, size, date, and other metadata.  The entry also contains a pointer (address on the disk) to where the data is on the disk (we'll leave out the fact that data doesn't have to be contiguous as it can be split to available areas on the disk).

Now when you delete a file, to make the delete process seem faster, only the file pointer data is deleted.  The actual data for the file is not deleted or overwritten at this time.  All that happens is the disk space that was used by the file is now flagged as being available for use.

The only time you data is actually overwritten is when you write a new file to disk and it happens to use the disk space that the old file used, which is really just a chance since most disk are fairly large and disk write operations tend to look for a location that can store the whole file without fragmentation.  The larger your disk and the less data stored on it, the higher the chance that your data will still be available.  If you have a small disk and it is mostly filled, then the greater the change that the files will have been overwritten.

Applications like CCCleaner don't overwrite files, they just help clean up directories.  A defragment has a chance of overwriting deleted files.  If you truly want to overwrite deleted files, take a look at applications that "shred" files on delete or a "disk wipe" application if clearing an entire disk.