Friday, December 03, 2004
Where does data go when you delete it? What Apple does right.
Imagine that every time you bought a house, the sellers stayed there until you moved in and evicted them.
That would be a strange way to manage property, but it's the way your computer manages disk space. When you delete a file, your computer's operating system takes ownership of the space the file occupied but leaves the data there until you need the disk space for something else.
That's why you can "undelete" a file if you're lucky and act fast. That's good news if you delete something by accident, but bad news if you really needed to get rid of the data.
Apple lets you delete a file so that you've really disposed of the data. In the "Jaguar" release of OS X, version 10.3, the Finder menu has a new choice. Below "Empty Trash", it has "Secure Empty Trash" which immediately writes over the unwanted data.
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That would be a strange way to manage property, but it's the way your computer manages disk space. When you delete a file, your computer's operating system takes ownership of the space the file occupied but leaves the data there until you need the disk space for something else.
That's why you can "undelete" a file if you're lucky and act fast. That's good news if you delete something by accident, but bad news if you really needed to get rid of the data.
Apple lets you delete a file so that you've really disposed of the data. In the "Jaguar" release of OS X, version 10.3, the Finder menu has a new choice. Below "Empty Trash", it has "Secure Empty Trash" which immediately writes over the unwanted data.
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