Imagine a binder with a table of contents, inside the binder there are pages, when deleting a file you just erase the page number, the page is still in the binder but you no longer know where to look. (If you want to find the pages again, there is special software, akin to looking through the binder page by page)
Some documents are several pages long, so when you later write something to the binder and replaces the pages, you might have page 4,7,9 of your document left, thats when it cannot be recovered anymore.
eotty t1_iy45ump wrote
Reply to comment by unlikemike123 in eli5 How is computer memory deleted? by unlikemike123
Imagine a binder with a table of contents, inside the binder there are pages, when deleting a file you just erase the page number, the page is still in the binder but you no longer know where to look. (If you want to find the pages again, there is special software, akin to looking through the binder page by page)
Some documents are several pages long, so when you later write something to the binder and replaces the pages, you might have page 4,7,9 of your document left, thats when it cannot be recovered anymore.