Fucking Governmnent...

[theVOID]

I think that such things are not really common

That's why you don't hear about it very often.

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I have bad news for you, my friends: all those compromising photos and videos that once were on your digital device are still there today! When you thought you deleted them you didn't actually delete them, but you only trashed the 'headers' and icons of those files. The stuff you can see on your desktop. That's gone. But the files themselves are not. They are still there, and any software engineer can retrieve them, even years later!

So while you don't even know yourself that you have compromising material on your PC or other digital devices, you do IRL! And 'they' can nab you for it! Which is e.g. why TSA checks are so dangerous.

Still like your digital devices as much...?

I have more bad news for you. You're wrong. They will be there until such time as the sectors of the disk used to store the data are rewritten with new data, this isn't a matter of years for most users (who's storage medium is near full capacity at any given moment) but rather the sectors will be rewritten multiple times within months of the deletion of the files in question. Fragments of the data *may* be recoverable depending on the storage medium - specifically magnetic disk devices (such as the typical hard disks where the polarisation of the magnetic platters can 'bleed' out and reveal binary data in the spaces between the 'write targets') but for solid state devices once the data on the device (nothing more than patterns of transistor states) has been rewritten the data is gone.

Moral of the story: Paedophiles should use SSD drives.

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Does formatting get rid of anything you've deleted?

It's still recoverable usually. Use something like DBAN instead.

Or merely populate the drive with data, format again, repopulate, format, repopulate, format etc DBAN is much quicker, as is the typical write-to-zero approach.