Ok, but people freak out way more when they permanently delete something by accident than the other way around. I doubt that will change.
No it didn’t. Filesystems have had the same delete semantics for half a century.
You are totally incapable of reconsidering your position, right? :rolleyes:Even when you are shown quite explicit evidence of your error, from multiple, highly authoritative sources.
All those definitions I gave include “draw a line through”, or something that means that, such as “strike out”. No-one, when writing, would delete by cutting a word out of the page and burning the scarp of paper containing it. Deleting something in the normal way, by drawing a line through it, marks it as to be ignored, but leaves it recoverable. (People sometimes erase writing with an eraser, which is a bit more destructive, and goes further toward making the original hard to recover, but they do not call that deleting. They call it erasing.) Obviously this is the original meaning, because writing long preceded the use of computers. The use of “delete” in reference to computing is a metaphor, and what computers actually do when you tell them to delete a file is, in fact, much more in accord with the true, original meaning of the word than what you would (apparently) like them to do. (What happens when you use the delete key on some unsaved text strains the metaphor a little more, although not in a way that matters. It is certainly not the paradigmatic, literal meaning of the word, which file deletion ought to imitate.) Computer system designers apparently have better English skills than you.
Also, as I already pointed out, in fact computers do sometimes interpret “delete” as, literally, “draw a line through”. If I use the <del> (for delete) tag in HTML or BBcode, it does indeed draw a line through the word, [DEL]thus[/DEL]. I would be very annoyed if use of such tags caused my text to disappear, and become unrecoverable.
You are wrong (about the English language) and computer system designers are right. What computers normally do when you tell them to delete a file is indeed appropriately called deleting, and what you would like them to do would better be called expunging, destroying, or (as it sometimes is called) erasing. It is useful to have different words for these functions, too, because, usually, what you really want to do is simply to delete a file rather than to expunge or erase it.
Unless you’re one of the guys who gets greeted at the door by Chris Matthews.
This has obviously diverted into an absurd semantical game far removed from the point of the OP. But, what the hell. Such is the way of the SDMB.
The OP clearly relates to the elimination of files from a computer hard drive, not a strained, pedantic discussion on the subtleties of the definition of the word “delete.” (“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”)
Yeah, and sometimes a waiter will interpret “crabs” to be a tiny insect but that better not be when I’m ordering dinner.
You can conveniently ignore a substantive part of the definitions you yourself provided that define delete as removing, erasing, expunging, etc. We both know that the average user interprets delete in this way, not what it means to a manuscript editor, which is akin to “marked for removal in future drafts.”
Again, what happens when you highlight text and hit the delete button? Don’t pretend this isn’t relevant with respect to how the average computer user interprets the word.
But, here’s another thought experiment for you. Take 100 people with average computer skill. Hand them a document and tell them to delete it. What will most of them do? Wad it up and throw it in the trash? Tear it up? Shred it? Eat it? Or will they draw a big line through it, hide it in a drawer and tell you they’ll come back some time in the future and write new words over it?
You can twist and torture the various definitions of the word, but to most people delete means permanently erase (even if they know some really smart guy may be able recover it.)
Not really. In the pre-Windows days (i.e. DOS) there was no easy method for recovering deleted files, for the general user. Sure, the data might still be on the disk but you would need some serious tools to get it back. When Windows introduced the Recycle Bin the difficulty of recovering a deleted file became a lot easier.
What’s easy for the user is irrelevant to how the filesystem actually works. The idea of deleting an entry from a directory without overwriting the actual data is almost as old as dirt. And the “undelete” command in DOS was not hard to use. 
I know that much of the world now assumes that the computer world began with Windows, or possibly MS-DOS (for those who have long memories), but I do want to correct the misapprehension that Windows was the first operating system in which “delete” saved the file somewhere (the recycle bin) so that it could be easily recovered before being permanently removed from the file system (if not from the disk). I’ll quickly mention that the Mac had its trash can from the start, before Windows, but the idea wasn’t original there, either, of course. The earliest system I used that had a feature like this was a DEC TOPS-20 operating system (which came out in 1976). There, the DELETE command did not permanently remove a file, at least not right away. You could issue an UNDELETE command any time before you logged out to recover files you had deleted that session. I think this feature was in the earlier TENEX system as well, and likely came from earlier systems.
It would be interesting to know what was the oldest operating system to have a feature like this.
As I recall, there was an expunge command in TOPS-20 if you really wanted the file to be irretrievable. Even then, I’m not sure if the OS wrote over the freed blocks.
You’re right, I meant to mention that. It’s the equivalent of the modern “empty trash” and happened automatically when you logged out, IIRC. I very much doubt that TOPS-20 overwrote the freed blocks, but I don’t know for sure. On the other hand, computers and storage were orders of magnitude slower then, so all the more reason not to spend time overwriting deleted files.
This is not true at all. My experience with computers only goes back to the 80s, and even back then Commodore 64s, when you deleted a file off disk, would only delete the directory entries to allow those sectors of the disk to be overwritten. Hence utilities like “undelete” that existed for the Commie 64. I’m not an expert on these things, but no computer I’ve ever owned actually wrote over the data when you deleted it by default. Hell, when you format a card in a camera or any other such device that uses flash memory, it doesn’t clear out the bits (except some cameras would have a “low level format” option which would overwrite the whole card with either 0s or 1s [I forget which]). I’ve actually managed to save data from a corrupted CF card by formatting it. (Don’t ask me how or why this worked, because I haven’t the faintest clue. Using several file rescue utilities on the card itself only yielded something like 5 or 6 files of 200. I formatted the card, took seven pictures, ran the utilties again, and got all 200 plus files back.)
If you hit ctrl-z it comes back.
Deletion takes time. Why would you want to waste time deleting something rather than just write on top of it when the time comes? Most files aren’t deleted because they are sooper sekert infoz–it’s just because they are useless. If some information really does need to be destroyed, you can always do so.
The claim of some sort of financial conspiracy theories are hilarious, though. The ignorance about computers and their history, less so.
:dubious:
Undelete is part of the PC-Tools command set; it’s not an original PC- or MS-DOS command. And yes we all know that the operating system simply marks the sector of disk as available but that is knowledge that everyday users don’t know.
Yes… and?
So delete does not mean gone forever in most computer contexts and hasn’t for a very very long time.
There is of course a difference between the trash/rubbish/recycle-bin/wastebasket and an undelete command. The bin makes explicit the two stage process. And Microsoft most certainly did not invent the idea. Not only was it on the Mac years before Microsoft had it, it was part of the desktop created by Xerox in the 70’s and commercially available as Viewpoint on the Star workstation introduced in 1981. It was introduced to the market 4 months before IBM introduced the first ever PC with MS-DOS. The genesis of the Star was in the Xerox Alto, which was built in 1973 for internal research work. Microsoft was a very long way behind the curve.
Some computer contexts. On the big mainframes (MVS) when a dataset is deleted it is gone. And it is not retrievable; there is no undelete or ctrl-z end of story. The only way to recover it is to restore it, and the source is from a backup which is intentionally taken (usually nightly). This is the only way to restore a dataset practically.
In fact, with RAID 5 (or 6 I forget which) it is almost impossible to ‘go to the disk’ and recover the tracks in raw format because the tracks are written in segments across 5 (or 6) disks in the array which only DFP keeps track of, or the internals of the machine. In the days of real 3390s retrieving data from one of the disks was probably something that could be accomplished but I never saw it.
In practice when you issue a delete command your data is gone. Unless you have some such undelete or unerase utility, and a lot of luck that nothing else was written to the disk before attempting a recover. Disassembling a hard drive to recover data is ridiculously hard and incredibly impractical that it isn’t a solution for nearly every computer user.
This is what made the Windows recycle bin a very nice invention.
I just recovered 3.xx Gig of data from an “empty” SD card.
I recovered 40ish files from my most recent photo taking expedition and 58 from the one before that.
It was a revelation.
As a serious hard-core pervert, it is very easy for me to imagine using the camera for “fun” pictures, downloading them to whatever secure location I felt comfortable then deleting them from the SD card.
Only to have my wife come along, run a recovery programme and cut my balls off.
This seems to me to be rather illogical.
For my holiday snaps, I don’t care whether they are deleted or not - I just want the space free for reuse (given that it’s limited) and also a “fresh” set of photos for easy downloading (so that I don’t have to worry about sorting).
For this sort of situation I guess the easy thing is to format the drive - which is fine if it is an SD card. But for your computer? Would it really be so difficult to have a command that meant “I really really really don’t want this any more” and “Look, I just don’t want this file taking up space and confusing me with too many files to search through”?
Such a command would get the absolute address of the file (beginning and end including extents) and write binary zeros on those tracks. Maybe such a tool exists I don’t know.
PS-as for that SD drive a simple bash with a hammer would render it safe from the wife