where does the data go?
By rdshinde05
@rdshinde05 (124)
India
5 responses
@ankilla (325)
• India
15 Apr 08
The data might be stored in some layers of the hard disk because recently i had used a third party software to retrieve some of my deleted data I was surprised when I saw some files which are still existing on hard disk after formatting my disk.
@james3302 (91)
• United States
15 Apr 08
And when you format your HD it writes nulls to every part of the HD. And then it sets up the File Allocation Table(a table that helps the computer look up where files are located on the HD). Depending on what type of formatting you do, whether FAT32 or NTFS that table is different.
@Asylum (47893)
• Manchester, England
15 Apr 08
If you delete a file the data usually remains intact, but the clusters used to store the data are marked as available. As further data is added to the hard drive the space occupied by the original data will be overwritten and disappear permanently.
It is because of the resident manner of data that such programs as "Shredders" were created. If you wish to ensure that data is irretrievably removed from the hard drive then you use a shredder, which will overwrite the clusters with random data and destroy the original content.
@emiliano75 (680)
• Italy
15 Apr 08
Ok my friend, for recover datas after formatting is available Photorec (is an opensource software) i give an experiment with this software, i can recover abuot 70% of datas that believe loss during formatting. Here, if you want have more information about this software, there is a wiky about this software http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
For delete permanently datas in your HD, don't give opportunity to recover datas, there is dban software:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBAN (wiky)
http://dban.sourceforge.net/ (official project website)
I hope that those information may be help you :-)
@ferdzNK (3211)
• Philippines
15 Apr 08
Actually the data or file never leave its position, a very small portion of it is marked as deleted, a shortcut would then be place in the recycle bin.
If we delete it accidentally, we will go to recycle bin, locate the file and issue the "Restore", what actually happen here is the file's deleted mark is remove and the shortcut is also removed from the recycle bin.
If we decide to delete this permanently, in the recycle bin we do the "Empty recycle bin", the shortcut will be deleted, but the file marked deleted is still there. That is why an Undelete utility or program can recover it.
@bradhart (659)
• United States
15 Apr 08
just as programs can find the missing data so too can they permanently erase it if you go through the trouble to do so which is time consuming and more hassle than it is usually worth. The best thing you can do to prevent your data from being compromised is never give up the hard drive when you get rid of the machine. I have some I have more than 35 old drives still sitting in a box from older machines my wife and I have gone through in the last 15 years. I am tempted to just go put a couple under the drill press and toss them out, which is a sure fire way to make sure no one recovers the data, ever. I laugh when I think about some of those drive have half or a quarter capacity of my sd card or flash drive.
BTW did anyone know you can run boot your xp machines with win 95/98 with nothing more than a flash drive...
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