Not to heaven. Not to hell. Not to Silicon Valley. Not even to Katmandu. For the sad story is the deleted files go nowhere at all. David Maier, professor at the Graduate Institute of Science & Technology’s department of computer science and engineering says: The bits and bytes representing the programs and files on the computer disk are generally unchanged immediately after an erase (or delete) command. What changes is the directory on the disk. The directory is a list of the names of all the files and programs on the disk, plus a pointer to the portion of the disk where the contents of the file or program are actually stored. When you issue an erase command, all it generally does is to remove the file or program name from the directory and to record elsewhere that the storage space on the disk formerly used for the file or program is now “free”–that is, available for reuse. The mechanism for changing the directory is amazingly
simple. Although the deleted files remain on the disk, programmer Larry
Whitish says, “ that the first letter of the file name is deleted and replaced
with a symbol that looks like “o,”(ASCII Character number 229): |
