exe file, portions of it may still be present in the Windows prefetch directory.

Prefetch: The Prefetcher in Windows helps applications load faster by creating prefetch files for applications.

On Windows 8, File History is constantly making backup copies and may have a backup of your files.

Shadow Copies: Windows automatically adds copies of files to “shadow copies,” and they can be recovered using System Restore.

For example, the text of a document may be present in a search index.

Search Indexes: Bits of the file may be recoverable from search indexes.

For example, extracting a ZIP, RAR, or other archive file will often place a copy of the archive’s contents into temporary files.

Temporary Files: If any program was using the file, its data may be stored in temporary files.

Even if you deleted the additional copy, the deleted copy’s data may still be present on your disk. Other Copies of the File: If, at any point, you had an additional copy of the file on your hard drive, the file may still be on your hard drive.However, there are other places that bits of the file may be lurking: Such tools do work on magnetic hard drives, erasing the current file’s data from the disk completely so it can’t be recovered from that place. RELATED: Why Deleted Files Can Be Recovered, and How You Can Prevent It Places Where the File Might Be Lurking This should prevent the data from being recoverable - yes, you should only have to overwrite the sectors once.

When you “securely delete” a file, the tool will delete the file normally and take note of where its data is stored, overwriting those sectors with junk data. Secure file deletion tools do what operating systems don’t normally do. RELATED: Learn How to Securely Delete Files in Windows Your computer would be much slower if it had to do this every time it deleted a file. For example, if you wanted to completely erase a 1 GB file, you would have to write 1 GB of data to the drive. Its sectors would have to be overwritten, so a quick task becomes a much longer operation. Operating systems only mark files as deleted because actually deleting a file’s data from your hard drive is slower. However, if you immediately try to recover the deleted file with a file recovery tool, you’d likely be able to get it back - at least on a magnetic hard drive. If you continue writing data to your hard drive, the sectors may eventually be overwritten with new data and the file will probably become unrecoverable.

File deletion programs