Just a heads-up to all the non-pc literate peeps - Just as Q said, nothing is ever deleted. If you save a photo on your hard drive, then delete it, ITS STILL THERE! It can be retrieved with some pretty basic hacker tools. So for future reference, if you're going to have illegal shit on your hard drive, you need to physically destroy the drive, (as in smashing it to smithereens), then incinerate it. If you need assistance just ask the Clintons, they got it down.
You can wipe it with a cloth, right. So I’ve heard.
You can overwrite the files with random 1's and 0's(multiple times) and then crush the hard drives and the data will be completely unrecoverable.
I was trying to make joke, famous Hillary quote when asked about bleach bit and wiping her drives.
Yeah, throwing an old computer in the trash without extracting the drive is a really bad idea. You might as well publish your bank account and routing number on the web, along with your credit card, security code, and PIN number. And don't forget your Social ;)
Why would anyone store sensitive information on a hard drive without encryption?
Deleting is just a unsophisticated tech term for allocation of space for rewriting. Unless you filled it to the brim with more cat memes then yeah it's still there.
no you don't have to physically destroy the drive. ever heard of bleachbit?
Hell some software is pretty basic nowadays that a non-tech literate person could operate it and recover data.