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Why ‘deleted’ doesn’t mean gone: How police recovered Nancy Guthrie’s doorbell footage
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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Technology
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What's the old adage? If it's on the internet it is there forever? except when nintendo IP lawyers or dmca douchebags are involved
Even local files still “exist” when you delete them. Usually the filesystem just marks those blocks as reusable since overwriting the data would take a lot longer.
Really with an SSD this makes extra sense. Not only would over writing the data immediately take some time but would also use up the limited write cycles faster.
Even with spinning disks all that extra write traffic isn’t exactly great.
Plus scrubbing floppies takes forever
It's on the internet forever, but whatever the regular user needs is lost behind poor content indexing and incompetent search functions