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@zircon wrote:
If nothing ever REALLY gets deleted how does deleting files increase your hard drive space and wouldn't the hard drive fill up eventually no matter how much you deleted?  (forgive my ignorance).

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Hi zircon

The data is basicly gone to the point ,,,,,,,,where traces left  can be over written. Thus that space is freed up for lets say reuse,,,,and appears on your hard drive again as free unused space.

Dell Dimension 4100 (incase upgrade) Intel(R) 2.4(oc 2.8) specs

Message Edited by rustymt on 05-03-2003 12:49 AM

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@zircon wrote:
If nothing ever REALLY gets deleted how does deleting files increase your hard drive space and wouldn't the hard drive fill up eventually no matter how much you deleted?  (forgive my ignorance).

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Your hard drive is like a file cabinet with an index in the front.  When you delete a file, it doesn't physically move, it changes in the index that it's now in the Recycle Bin, not in let's say My Documents.

Then, when you empty the Recycle Bin, the listing of the file in the index is erased.  The file remains in the same spot, but the pointer to find it is gone.  This space is then freed up for you to use, and the amount of free space on your machine goes up. 

When you then write a file to the drive, eventually it will grab some or all of the space that the original file took up.  Eventually, all of the space will get occupied.  If you do a Defrag, that will most likely overwrite the area very quickly when all the files are moved around.

Hope this helps. 

Space on the hard drive where a file was before it was deleted is freed up for reuse, The real eater of hard drive space is the  build up of  files that are not found and regularly deleted. The following is taken from the down load page of one of my favorite disk cleaning utilites. I have had it find ,,,,and help me safely delete over 800 files in a single scan. Average scans runs say 40 -120 if I do it often.

There exists many kinds of 'temporary' files that all have in common that they steadily increase in number and thus slowly eat up your hard disk space. Some programs use temporary files to hold intermediate data but do not delete them after program shutdown (e.g. just take a look in your Windows\Temp directory where many such files end up). Many setup programs are prime examples of this. Other programs keep producing lots of unwanted log files. Yet others automatically create backup files of edited documents. Internet browsers create a lot of cache files, 'cookie' files, history files, et c, et c.
The problem is that if you don't clean up such files periodically, your free disk space will slowly but steadily shrink and it will be more difficult to find the files that you do want because of all the junk littering it. If you are really unlucky, Windows may even crash because it hasn't got enough space for its virtual memory swap file.
The solution? CleanDisk will help you automate the task of removing most such unwanted files. Using a very easy-to-use three-step process it will quickly scan your hard disk(s) for unwanted files and assist you in deleting them! It's as easy as that

Dell Dimension 4100 (incase upgrade) Intel(R) 2.4(oc 2.8) specs