does deleting what youve been on from your history completely delete it?

Nope, it deletes it permanently unless you have a program like Manic Time running in the background.

For your average user, yes its gone

But what actually happens, is on a PC nothing is actually “deleted”. It just removed the address for the file so the OS can’t find it any more. The data is still on your hard drive, and with the right software you can find it.

To make the file unrecoverable, you need to write data over it, several times. More times the better. Because with only a few write overs high end data recover software can still get parts of it back

I have Webroot’s Window Wash program write over everything I delete a 20 some times to make sure its more or less unrecoverable. While probably not necessary, just makes the paranoid part of me feel better.

Nope! If you delete somthing it’ll still be on the computer. And they sell lots of recovery disks for computers. I would’nt do anything I don’t want anyone to see on the computer just for that reason.

That’s a really good answer :) HIstory is stored in the format of hidden index.dat files, aren’t they. Another good program is MilShield - they have a free trial, but you have to pay after the first month. And they also overwrite these files like 20 times or something. :)

There are software’s available these days for each and every purpose and even if the important files are deleted ,it can be recovered back using recovery softwares

Nothing is ever deleted from your computer. It simply logically deletes from the file allocation tables creating an illusion of deletion. Even after formatting about 4 times also data can be recovered up to a certain level. In investigations I have seen data which is overwritten also being recovered. There are certain forensic software to recover every thing you do. Including the searches you do on google or any other search engine can be recovered, which USB device was plugged can be recovered. History can be recovered at any time. Every URL, file or document used on your PC can be see and recovered. Even the IP with which your PC has communicated with can be recovered.

Even if you delete this index.dat file history can still be recovered. There is also a 50-50 chance of recovering and losing data. Even traces can be a good lead.

Everything you do on a computer can be recovered. Your folders your history is all stored into what are called file allocation tables, when you delete, you actually delete only this entry. But when you repartition or overwrite the same data again and again, it becomes difficult to recover it. So what you actually work with called as folders and drives are just logical not really in your computer. History of your computer does not get deleted just by deleting it once, you can use Track Eraser Pro, it shreds your data of any kind.