253
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
253 points (98.1% liked)
Technology
81026 readers
3858 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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