Deleting Files, the Dummy Version

Windows recycle bin, empty and full

If there’s any lesson you should have learned from television “hackers” over the years, it’s that moving a file into the trash on your computer doesn’t actually delete it. What: you didn’t already know that? Take comfort in the fact that lots of people, like you, don’t know that “deleting” a file simply flags the file as invisible to the file system and allows the space where it’s been stored to be overwritten by newer files. Well, eHow.com’s Gwendolen Akard didn’t know that, either – but by golly, she didn’t let that stand in her way when she wrote “How to View List of Recently Deleted Files,” now housed on Leaf Group’s Techwalla niche site.

As we’ve come to expect of freelancers with backgrounds like this college music/philosophy major, Akard’s tech-savvy is regrettably low. Rather than researching file recovery, Gwendolen does little more than point people toward their recycle bin (Windows) and trash bin (Mac), ignoring UNIX in its entirety – understandable, since she’d probably never heard of it. Of course, telling people to look there takes only about twenty words, so Akard found herself reduced to using about a third of her post to explain for Windows users (back in the XP days, for whatever that’s worth) how to recover a missing recycle bin icon. Gotta meet that minimum word count…

In reality, however, only the boobiest of technoboobs doesn’t know how to recover a file that’s been moved into the trash or recycle bin. As Akard herself says, “When you delete a file on your computer, the action is usually never final…”  …a factoid almost everyone who uses computers already knows (not to mention rather poor grammar for a self-described “professional writer”). It’s how to find that same list of recently-deleted files after you’ve emptied the trash that the less techno-savvy among us may suddenly find themselves wanting to know, a topic Akard gives a wide berth.

The answer is that there are plenty of software packages out there that can find those deleted files even after you’ve emptied the trash. Around our office, we use a freeware file recovery program called Recuva. Unfortunately, anyone who happens to read Akard’s post to Techwalla will never learn that such a thing is possible, much less that you simply need to google “file recovery” to get the help our Dumbass of the Day didn’t provide.

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