11-17-2012, 10:12 PM
riley5108 wrote:
if I drag the files off the thumb drive into the trash and select Secure Empty Trash will that totally erase the files from the thumb drive?
Kind of.
...Within the bounds of ordinary measures to recover the files.
The problem with flash-based storage (including SSDs) is that the data on the drive can be shuffled around periodically to minimize the impact of redundant write-cycles on short-lived memory-registers. This is less of a problem with USB flash drives than with SSDs, but it is still an issue.
Securely-erasing a file overwrites the file in its present location, but since portions of the file may have been rewritten several times across many places on the drive, there's a good chance that much of the file is still present and readable with the appropriate software. It take more than a simple undelete app to do the job, but the data's not impossible to get.
The best way to securely erase a file from a flash-based drive is to securely erase (overwrite) the whole drive.