Does the recycle bin really delete everything on your computer ?

NO, it is only removed from the FAT (File allocation Table) it only deletes the first letter of the file name. It is not truly gone until another file overwrites the same space in the drive

Yes. Data is stored as 0’s and 1’s. 0 is nothing and 1 is something.

Deleting stuff from the recycle bin sets that part of the drive to all zeros.

Once something’s in your recycle bin you don’t have fully functional access to it, but it still uses memory.

Once you manually delete it from the bin, then that memory space is available for other items.

I think of it as three stages of deletion.

1)
If you are using Windows, everything is perfectly retrievable until you choose “Empty Recycle Bin”. You can simply drag the files out of the bin.

2)
After you choose “Empty Recycle Bin”, things aren’t actually deleted, but their references are gone. So think of a book, where you wipe out something from the Table of Contents and Index. It’s still in the book, but it’s hard to find.

3)
When your computer needs the space, it really will write over those files and they will be truly gone.

@jaytkay simply copy 10 gigs of files, check your HD space, and then delete it to the recycle bin, then empty it. That 10 gigs is gone.

Nothing is truly ever erased unless you zero out the hard drive. Once you have moved something to the recycle bin, the computer flags it as memory that can be overwritten. In a sense, this does open up space for use, but that doesn’t mean it is gone. It will continue to exist until you install/download other things. The computer will then overwrite these files.

@XOIIO
That’s not right.
If you have a file, your hard drive has the zeros and ones of the data encoded into it, but there’s also a system that keeps track of which digits are part of the file and which aren’t. What if you have a file that ends in some zeros right next to a stretch of empty space? The computer needs to be able to tell it’s part of the file.
Since it has that system, the “empty” space doesn’t have to be all zeros, it just has to be designated as not part of any file, and that it’s okay to overwrite it.
That’s what happens when you delete a file. The zeros and ones remain as they are, for the moment, but the system designates that it’s okay to overwrite them.

@XOIIO Yes, the 10GB shows as available. Practically speaking, in normal use, the space is empty.

But the files are still there until the physical part of the disk is overwritten. They are easy to retrieve.

Recuva , for example, is a good Windows “undelete” program.

The data is there unless you overwrite it. It is just removed from the File Allocation Table when its ‘deleted’. I just had to recover literally 1,000,000 ‘deleted’ files for a client on a company laptop.

Assumption here is Windows OS.
When you delete a file in Windows, it is only marked for delettion and the reference of where the file location was is removed. It is then referenced in the recycle bin. Each disk has its own Recyle bin. The free space is not adjusted when you delete a file (unless it is a very large file and it will hard delete it). You can empty the recyle bin with a right click option and the free space is updated. You can restore the file also if it is still in the recyle bin and return it to its original location.
You can hard delete a file by holding the Shift key and hitting delete or dragging a file to the recyle bin while holding shift. This bypasses the recyle bin.
Once out of the recyle bin, the location that the file takes up can be overwritten. The location on the disk for the complete file is usually fragmented and once the space is needed for a new file to be written, the integrity of the originally deleted file is gone.
There are tools that can undelete file that have been deleted from the recyle bin, but as just listed, once the space is started ot be used by new overwrites, all bets are off on piecing it back together.
Low level forensics can be performed but at significant costs to get the data that has been overwritten, but it is possible.
The only true way to erase the data is either a multiple pass of various pattern ones and zero writes (about 100) or the disk to be degaused.