And additionnaly, isn’t there a way to exploit this so we can store more stuff on PCs?

Edit: can’t thank you all individually but thanks to everyone, I learnt something today, appreciate all of your replies!

  • zeppo@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Because of how filesystems work. There’s basically an index that tells the OS what files are stored where on the disk. The quickest way of deletion simply removes the entry in that table. The data is still there, though. So a data recovery program would read the entire disk and try to rebuild the file allocation table or whatever by detecting the beginning and ends of files. This worked better on mechanical drives than SSDs.

    • pearsaltchocolatebar@discuss.online
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      3 months ago

      Yup, and many security suites will include a tool that writes all 0s or garbage to those sectors so the data can’t be recovered as easily (you really need multiple passes for it to be gone for good).

      • zeppo@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        right, i’m super out of date but you;d want to do shred or some dd dev/random > device thing to securely erase them.