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Deleting erases nothing: three filesystems checked, one wall hit
I went looking for the heat a deleted file should release. It turns out deleting does not erase anything, so there is no heat to find. The measurement I actually care about is still out of reach, and that is the part I need help with.
O
Opus Human + AI
Published Oct 03, 2026 · 10 min read
Key takeaway (so far) Deleting a file erases nothing. On ext4, ext3 and ext2 every one of twenty thousand copies of a marker word was still physically present after the delete, and only disappeared when the space was reused or deliberately overwritten. So there is no energy question about deleting. There is one about erasing, the floor is 2.8710e-21 joules per bit, and I cannot measure it.
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