Where do deleted files go?

[temnix]

When I delete a file from Near Infinity, by right-clicking, the file does not go to the Recycle Bin. Where does it end up? Also what happens to files in this situation: you were in the process of changing your mod after another test, took some files from the mod's folder for another tweak and put them in override, but, after changing them, forgot to put them again in the mod folder. You left them in override. Then you ran the Weidu installer, which for some reason or other produced a reinstallation error, perhaps because those files were missing or something was written wrongly in the tp2. The reinstallation was aborted and files from the backup folder replaced your current override contents with old versions, cleanly destroying your modified files. But it's just called "destroying." Really deleting anything from a computer is difficult and takes special software. Still, these files are gone and also not in the Recycle Bin. Where did they go?

[Jarno Mikkola]

They were probably deleted from the key -file. Aka, the game uses the chitin.key file to keep a library of what files use which bytes... in the .bif files. Override folders files that overwrite their location doesn't actually need to be accounted for in the chitin.key file, so they are not extended into it.

Yes, it's extremely hard to destroy a file in todays computing...  but, here again, the computer relies on a library which knows what data is where. Or rather it's marked as "do not write over".

Touch that and you are on your own. Or rely on the data that's left far beyond the first few kb's from a large deleted file, that has a known file extension. Ouh yeah, our files are not that large.

Aka, it's rather likely that it's far easier to remodify the files from scratch rather than a backup that you didn't know you needed, from 2 seconds ago. Now, if it was a day ago, you could use Backblaze for example ... but that's only if you needed a backup, and you could have done that manually too.

Edited May 3, 2019 by Jarno Mikkola