system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Where do deleted files go?

Where do deleted files go?
gpt
They actually don't go anywhere unless you tell them to very specifically.

Imagine you have a book full of random words. The first word is #1, the second word is #2 and so on. Say the first page looks like this:

cat had a dog Jill

You can tell a story: *Jill had a cat*, by telling the reader to go to words 5, 2, 3, and 1 in that order. But it's meaningless without that pointer reference, so all you need to do to destroy that story is remove the list of pointing numbers. 

That's how your computer stores files on its drive. There is a pointer file that tells it where chunks of that file are located, often in one place but sometimes (and often for really big files on small drives) broken in a bunch. 

When you delete the file, you actually just delete the pointers that tell the computer "your file's chunks are first here, and then here, and then here" as well as the pointers that protect those parts of the hard drive and say "when you're storing new information, do not put anything else here, or here, or here, because those places are already in use".

Step 1 is to keep the area protected, but move the pointers to those region to your Recycle Bin. This is so you can easily recover them.

Step 2, when you empty your Recycle bin, is to delete the pointers and tell the computer those parts of the hard drive are now usable to store other things, essentially unlocking them so they can be written over later.

You can PERMANENTLY destroy all references to those files by writing zeroes to every part of your hard drive's storage, wiping out anything that was previously stored there. Governments do this when disposing of computers that have held sensitive information.