Weird Question...exactly how does a game "delete" data? Where does it go?

[nordlead]

Katilian said:

nordlead said:

Mr Khan said:

Huh, i didn't know about the overwrite thing. I figured the data was just voided.

 

That explains how the police are able to reconstruct illegal data from your harddrive, even if you think you've deleted it.

Actually, even if you write all 0's to the memory, the police can still recover what is there due to magnitic history if they have the write tools. To truely erase something, you have to follow the NSA standards which are something like Write 1's, Write 0's, (repeat 3x) then some alternating 1/0 thing and repeat, finally end with all 0's.

Actually, with modern hdds, a single write is all that is generally needed.

'According to the 2006 NIST Special Publication 800-88 (p. 7): "Studies have shown that most of today’s media can be effectively cleared by one overwrite" and "for ATA disk drives manufactured after 2001 (over 15 GB) the terms clearing and purging have converged."' (Link to PDF)

cool, well I guess that amazing capability hasn't made it over to the flash that we use on our hardware. I know they used to follow the same standards for clearing, but I only check out the standards when I'm forced to for a project and we've only used flash recently.