When is a deleted file actually removed from your device, or at least when does it become unrecoverable? It turns out that this question isn't always easy to answer, nor is a secure file deletion easy to achieve in all circumstances. To better understand this we have to start from the basic principle that when you delete a file on your computer you are only deleting the pointer to the file, not the actual data. The data on your hard disk drive (HDD) is stored magnetically in sectors on platters that spin round inside the HDD (we'll come onto SSDs in a bit). So, how does the computer know where to look for your file? It has a table of indexes such as the File Allocation Table (FAT) or Master File Table (MFT) in NTFS. When you delete a file in your OS, all you are actually doing is removing its entries from the table of indexes so your OS can't find it any more and doesn't know it's there. However, all the data is still stored on the disk and IS STILL RECOVERABLE! T...