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This may be a dumb question to ask, and Google doesn't really tell me, but when you delete something off of your hard drive or SD what happens to it. This isn't a "how can I not be caught doing something bad" I obey the law. Like how does it "dispose" of the unwanted items 

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I think it just deletes the link to where they are. Say you had a small house in the woods and you threw away the map. It's still there, just no one knows the way. But if you bulldozed it (or on a PC, secure wipe, which overwrites he free space with 1s and 0s multiple times), then it really is gone forever. 

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Short answer. The file remains in the system but just isn't register it. Think of it as deleting an application shortcut. You can't get to the application/file anymore but its still there. When the computer needs space, it simply rewrites the old file. This is why formatting a storage device doesn't actually do anything.  

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