files deleted?

[kwokwai]

I am sure everyone should have the experience of deleting files by pressing the "Delete" key or chosing delete from the right-click menu, but in fact, the files you delete are actually not deleted from your PC, that's why they can be recoveried by some programs.
This is not the main issue I want to talk about; however, what I am concerned about is if such the files deletion activity will lead to failure of windows. :hammer3:

I am always doing screen capture and vedio recording in my PC, and then delete those unwanted. Sometimes such the deleted files can be up to 10GB.
I am worried about if this activies will cause damage to both Hard-disk and Windows. As I mentioned above, the files deleted are still existing in the PC, one day when these "unwanted" files accumulate to a dangerous level, then the hard disk must have to be formatted, you can't delete any files any more, or it would be the last time you are using this Hard Disk.

Is it just a case of 'little things affect little minds'? :confused:
Advise me!

[bear]

When you delete a file, you're not really removing it from the disk. What you're doing is removing the "pointer" that tells Windows where a file starts and stops. Kind of like a table of contents. The section of disk that contained the file is then marked as free space to allow writing, and if the space is needed, it gets used.

They can't accumulate after deletion, since the space is used as needed.
Will it harm the disk? Doubtful. As it's their only job, they are capable of writing and deleting the same sections over and over many times.
Will it hurt Windows?
The only time you'll get into trouble is if you haven't been deleting the old files. If you run seriously low on disk space, then you have something to worry about...

[kwokwai]

...The section of disk that contained the file is then marked as free space to allow writing, and if the space is needed, it gets used.
...

Did you mean the files that have been deleted will be overwritten?
If it does, why some programs can recover those deleted files?

[wera]

Becase if they have not been over written then you can recover em...i think.

[bear]

Yes, they will eventually be overwritten as the space is needed. Files are not written to the disk in one spot, for the most part. Windows will grab sections of the disk that are "non-contiguous" to place bits of the file where they will fit best. Deleting means the part that recalls where all the bits are is removed, leaving the randomly located file sections lost, essentially.

They can be recovered (for a while, at least) because they are not completely gone, only the reference to them has been removed. The recovery program can reconstruct the "table of contents" for the missing data in many cases, if the space on the disk hasn't been overwritten yet.

[kwokwai]

Some of the file wiper programs, as they suggested, can really delete the files from the HD.
How do these programs differ from just pressing the delete key?

I don't know the way they destroy the files! :confused:

[bear]

What they do is to write over the space that the files occupied several times with random ones and zeros. The more times (passes) it does this, the less chance there is of recovering the original data.