Deleting file from Android device, iPhones, computers or laptops does not erase it completely. There is still a possibility to recover the deleted data. So if one is planning on selling personal mobile phone or laptop, even after removing all the data, then also there are chances that anyone can access your personal stuff. And no one wants to get blackmailed with their scandalous stuff.

In computers/laptops it mostly depends on the hard disk used, if it is SSD (Solid State Drives) then deleted data is hard to recover as it completely removes the file from its memory. But this is not true in case of hard disks. Hard disks use pointers for storing the location of file whenever created. Therefore on deleting any file its pointer gets deleted but the data is not removed from drive. It is still recoverable.

Usually it takes only few seconds to remove any amount of data even data worth 10 GB space, however while writing data of same amount takes a lot more time. Which mean actual removal of data should also take that much time to free up the space. But what happens is that on files are removed and data is removed from disk only when it is re-written with some other data. That is after deleting some files from your lappy that data will be removed only if you write new data over it.

There are a lot of third party applications/softwares that help in restoring these discarded files. Windows does not provide any in built way to recover deleted data. Therefore, one must ensure to remove their data completely before it is in hands of others because no one wants that a third person should have access to their personal stuff.

There are a lot of ways thorough which you can prevent your data from being restored even after deletion which will be discussed in another article. Or if you want to recover the deleted data then refer to following article.