Residual media

Imagine you are baking cookies and you accidentally drop some cookie dough on the kitchen counter. Even if you clean the counter really well, there might still be some leftover cookie dough, right? This leftover cookie dough is like residual media.

Residual media is like a leftover trace of something that was once there. In the case of digital media, it refers to the leftover data or information that remains on a device or storage medium even after it has been deleted or erased.

Let's say you take a picture with your phone and then you delete it. Even though the picture is no longer visible in your photo gallery, there might still be residual media left on your phone's storage. This residual media could be bits and pieces of the image file that were not completely erased.

Residual media can be a problem when it comes to privacy and security. For example, if you sell or give away an old phone without properly wiping its storage, someone else may be able to access residual media and potentially gain access to your personal information or images.

To prevent this, it is important to use software tools to securely erase or wipe the storage of a device or medium to ensure that no residual media is left behind.