Fun fact: there’s no such thing as delete in disk space. When you “delete” a file the space on the storage drive is marked as available so that other data can overwrite it, but the data is not actually gone yet. There is software to overwrite the marked space many times over if you want to truly make the data disappear.
Discussion
this is good to know.. sounds like it would make my phone 10x faster if it truly deletes data instead of keeping it to be replaced
but i wonder if im capable of doing that
I’m not sure what solutions exist for phones.
Negative. It would make deletes take longer, wear your SSD out twice as fast, and gain no performance when writing something again.
To the computer, (or phone in the case) there is no difference between random bits being overwritten, and a perfect flat space of 0’s. It overwrites them the same, and sees them the same. They’re both “blank” or “empty” because the file system says so.
Truly erasing the data only matters in court when they recover things you thought were gone. 🤣
This is only really true for HDDs, SSDs are much more complicated. Many mark and immediately clear blocks, but data that exists on blocks that are still in use can't be deleted without moving the in-use stuff to another blokc.
This is for hard drives, nand flash (SSD) like your phones act VERY differently and it's still not fully understood how to permanently erase data from them from what last se read