Originally posted by Alcatraz
What I mean is: First you send the file to the recycle bin, then you empty the recycle bin...can you still recover the file?
Okay, a little background info...

Deleting things to the recycle bin isn't *really* deleting them. What happens is that windows puts a special character in front of the filename, one that DOS can't read. Anyway, the files in the 'recycle bin' are really just a list of files that are hidden from the system. When you empty the recycle bin, *then* they are deleted in the conventional sense, meaning that the clusters they occupied are marked as empty.

It's like having a garage full of cardboard boxes with stuff in them. You have a clipboard that shows what parts of what stuff are in which boxes, and in which order. Usually stuff is in boxes that are next to each other, but not always (defragmenting your files means rearranging these boxes so as to make it easier to find things for your hard drive.)

Conventional deletion means that you erase the entry on the clipboard, rather than actually removing the stuff from the box and burning it. When you put stuff into the box, the stuff already inside is destroyed...

So the file MIGHT still be around, if you haven't tried to put new stuff into the box it last occupied. Finding the file is like looking through these hundreds of boxes, trying to find all the pieces, and some of the box contents might be over-written.

Short answer: Possible, but not something you want to do for fun.