PureBasic Forums - English

In Windows, when you delete a file it is actually not really deleted from the drive.

So, if I delete a file that is 2G and my hard drive only has 2G free, then
I create a file that is 2G, is the file really deleted now?

If you write to all bytes of the 2 gb new file you created, recovery of the old file becomes more difficult.

.

@spacebuddy

There's no guarantee that all your old data will be overwritten.

The OS may have allocated and deallocated part of the 2G for other purposes between you deleting the old file and creating the new file. So you may not be overwriting all of the sectors originally used by the old file. Some of your old sectors might now reside, unchanged, in files belonging to another task.

If security is your concern, you're better off to overwrite the file with garbage data before you delete it.