Quote:
Originally Posted by teh ghey
Then why does reformatting free up so much space?
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Ok, let me retry the library analogy another way... formatting irretrievably whites out the title page and spine of the library books. You can't easily see what's in the collection as a whole, but you can still pick up random books and read the text inside them.
Same with a computer format. The actual content data is not overwritten, just the indexing that points to it.
To write out a new (empty) index will take seconds. To wipe every sector on (say) a 500GB hard drive will take a couple of hours, minimum.