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From an article on file recovery I read, that when a file is deleted on your computer, only a pointer to the file is deleted and the space occupied by the file is marked as free to use. Is the only reason for this to recover "deleted" files or are there any other reasons why the space occupied isn't actually deleted (bits set to zero)?
Consider erasing the blocks used by a file on slow media. FAT was initially designed for floppy disks, and even floppies became faster as technology progressed. The ability to recover deleted files is largely a side effect of the decision to not overwrite the data, not the other way around. More modern file systems (particularly those with copy-on-write technology: btrfs, zfs, ...) have other considerations (by the time you delete the file, you might not even have a record of where each copy has been stored historically, and you certainly don't want to double every write if you don't have to). – a CVn – 2012-11-08T13:35:16.177