Permanently Delete Your Data: The Deceiver That Is Constantly Deceiving You!

7 min readJul 27, 2021

Your computer is playing a trick on you from the very beginning. It’s saying something in front of you but it’s doing completely the opposite behind you. Suppose, you have something confidential on your computer. If someone sees that, it will cause you a lot of trouble for sure. So you decide to make it completely gone for good after your work is done. You don’t just want to delete your data, you want to permanently delete all of them so that no one can find them in the future. You command your computer to delete those data permanently. Then your computer is asking, “Are you sure you want to permanently delete this file?” and you click yes, cause you want to vanish them completely. Now It’s done and you may get a big relief now, as there is nothing to worry about. But a few days later, an incident makes your life completely upside down. One of your opponents gets a hold of everything that you have permanently deleted. And now what happens? Well, you know the ending here! So how did this happen? Absolutely simple, that opponent somehow got the computer and recovered all data. You may disagree with me that that person didn’t just delete his data, he deleted them permanently, so how is this possible! Let me give you a shock here — Deleting your data permanently doesn’t actually delete your data permanently. Welcome to the world of deceivers, readers. By the end of this article, you will get most of your answers. But first, let’s start from the root.

What do Data mean?

To keep it most simple, Data is something from which you can get information. Data is a collection of facts — numbers, words, measurements, observations, or just descriptions of things — you can consider all of them as data. You can store data in a paper or electronic memory or a human mind. Since the arrival of computer science, we commonly refer to data as something that is stored or exchanged electronically.

How Computer Stores Data?

Computers store data in their memory/storage such as — hard disk drive (HDD) or solid-state drive (SSD). Computers store all sorts of data — audio, video, image, sound, text, and many more — in a series of bits. Bits are binary digits that have only two values — 1(One) and 0(Zero). Computers reserve data in their memory using voltage signals. In binary terms, the presence of a voltage signal means 1 or on and the absence of a voltage signal means 0 or off. This process is called digital format. In today’s world, computers create processes and save data in a fully digital way. Because of this digital format, transferring data from one computer to another computer has become completely painless. The core advantage of this process is, data has no chance to deteriorate or lose quality over time because of using it multiple times.

What Happens When You Delete Data?

When you delete data, which you can refer to as a file here, it goes to the Recycle Bin in Windows operating system. Recycle Bin is a folder or directory that stores all data that are deleted from the computer. Apart from Windows, other operating systems also have Recycle Bin but only the name is different. Recycle Bin acts as temporary storage. All files that you delete from the computer go to the Recycle Bin. You can restore the deleted files from Recycle Bin in case you need it or you accidentally delete any file. If you delete a file from a folder, you can’t see that file in that folder anymore. But that doesn’t mean it has been deleted, it is stored in the Recycle Bin. The files in the Recycle Bin also occupy disk space as they are only marked for deletion, not deleted yet. The files only get deleted (Not permanently deleted) when you delete that file from Recycle Bin. When a file gets deleted from Recycle Bin, that file is not discoverable or readable anymore by the computer. That’s when the computer releases the space reserved for that file considering the space as free so that the other files can use that space.

Delete VS Permanently Delete — From A Computer’s Perspective

It’s time for a clear statement from our fellow computers. According to the computers, it stores data inside the memory with a reference. Reference is simply the location of the data inside the memory. Memory is a huge space where there are many references and those references contain data. If you want to compare it with our real-life for then It’s something like — you are data, your home address is reference, and your country is memory. When you delete a file from Recycle Bin, you are actually deleting the references of the data of that file. And poor computers can’t look up that data without reference. So the computers think that the data of that file is gone and the allocated space for that file should be freed for new files. But here comes the twist, the data of that file is actually there in the memory, without any reference, completely hidden from you. If you somehow can generate that reference using any tool, then the data will become visible again. Now for permanently delete, along with the reference, the data will also be removed. You can perform this action on a computer using [SHIFT]+[DELETE]. This action will give you free space immediately. And by permanently deleting a file, you can’t restore it easily as it will not be stored in the Recycle Bin anymore.

Why Computer Doesn’t Delete Your Data Permanently In First Attempt?

Computers always try to give us the best possible performance as output. For a computer, deleting the reference of data is super fast than permanently deleting the entire data. If you are deleting a 15 GB file, it will take several minutes for your computer to permanently delete it. But the only delete process can be done in a couple of moments. So to make work faster and increase the performance, computers go for the delete instead of permanently delete.

How Do Recovery Tools Recover Your Permanently Deleted Data?

Data recovery software basically scours a drive, locates recoverable data, and finally brings all the pieces together in the correct order. Remember, not all data is recoverable, data recovery software tries best to recover as much data as possible. The success rate of data recovery depends on the file system of the device. Data recovery works best in the Windows NTFS file system. This file system doesn’t permanently delete any data, so there always remains the highest chance of data recovery in this file system. But this doesn’t work when new data overwrites it. Now for FAT or BSD UFS file systems, data recovery gives too much hassle. Along with overwriting problems, if the data is corrupted or located in the bad sector in a drive, then data recovery becomes difficult.

There are lots of noteworthy data recovery tools that scan the storage, find specific information, and finally, recover the data if possible with maximum efficiency. The top 10 specialized free tools for data recovery are -

Can You Really Delete Your Data Permanently?

Technically saying, with the advancement of technology making your data completely gone forever is mostly impossible. But you can make it too hard for someone to recover your data. Let’s see how you can do it -

Overwrite: Overwrite means replacing old data with new ones. The more you overwrite, the more your data will become irrecoverable. Another advanced version of data overwriting is data shredding. By overwriting data, the bits of data get replaced with zeros which is a general method. But shredding is more complex than overwriting. You can use the top file shredding tools for overwriting purposes for free such as — Eraser, Freeraser, Alternate File Shredder, Moo0 File Shredder, File Shredder, WipeFile, BitKiller, etc.
Use Solid State Drive: Solid State Drive or SSD is well-known as the advanced form of Hard Disk Drive or HDD, where you can store data and use them to give you better performance than HDD. Data recovery from an SSD is quite a painful task. HDD uses magnetic platters and moving parts to store data, so locating data in HDD is much easier. But SDD uses semiconductor chips to store data and it has no moving parts. The data storing process of SSD comes with so much complexity and the location of data always changes. And it’s obvious that without an actual location, you can’t find the data of that location. That’s how you can guard your data using an SSD.
Destroy Physically: Although the mentioned two methods above are the best, fortune may not be in your favor sometimes. So, if you have high-level classified information, it’s better to destroy it physically such as — for HDD, just destroy the magnetic disk which is also known as a platter. You can set it on fire, cut it up with a saw or magnetize it for this purpose.

Now save your day and others by following the proper steps to delete your data permanently so that no one can find that again in the future.