On most file systems, just deleting a file simply deletes the link between the filename and the data on disk, the actual data remains fully intact until the blo

On most file systems, just deleting a file simply deletes the link between the filename and the data on disk, the actual data remains fully intact until the blocks are overwritten by new data. It's trivial to recover recently deleted files, and often not much more effort to recover less recently deleted files. It only becomes a challenge if the data has been long deleted or was intentionally overwritten before deletion (or the disk wiped using random data), in some cases becoming effectively impossible to recover.