where do the deleted items or files go in the computer

When you delete a file on a Windows computer, it is moved to the computer's Recycle Bin, and Later, when you empty the Recycle Bin and the files are deleted, what happens to the deleted files? Where do they go? 

   Seriously they don't go anywhere, all that happens is your hard drive recognizes the space they occupied as empty and ready to written over. Until that happens they can be recovered, or even if sectors of the file still haven't been overwritten they can be partially recovered. That's why you might see a movie scene where the FBI or whatever recover something from a hard drive and it is in fragments that need piecing together

   If you look at How Hard Disks Work, you can see that a traditional hard disk is a disk that is divided into thousands of sectors. Each sector holds a certain number of bytes (e.g. 512 bytes per sector) that is determined when you format the disk.Let’s say your file is 10,000 bytes long. It is stored as a set of roughly 20 sectors on the disk. When you delete a file, all you are doing is changing a pointer to an address on the hard drive. The file is NOT deleted, the address where the file is located is made available for the next write operation.

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   For your better understanding think of your hard drive as a battle ships board game or pigeon holes at a post office. You have a grid, on the left you have numbers along the bottom letters. When you search for a file you are asking the computer the co-ordinates 23 - k for example. It goes to 23 - k and retrieves your file. When you delete a file, its not the file that gets deleted, its the co-ordinates ! Which is why files that have been deleted can be found with special software.

 
    If you want to really delete files, you should format your hard drive. If your really really want to delete files, smash the disk up with a hammer and hammer it a bit more until it looks like tin foil ! 

  Because the file is technically there, it may be able to be recovered using data recovery software, designed to rebuilt the file header and allow the computer to see the file again. This software only works if no other file or data has been saved over the top of the deleted file. 

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