I suppose you could consider it going on a tangent but I think it's more escalating the topic to the point of being interesting. Anyone who has been around computers for a long time knows how file deletion works and all of us have seen video or movies about people piecing together shredded documents.

The connection to life and information is quite relevant to the topic of deletion. In fact I believe even Stephen Hawking concerned himself with the concept of information loss (deletion) with regards to blackholes and the problems with conservation of energy (energy in the form of entropy). The resolution he came to involved the outer edge of a blackhole maintaining a version of this information forever.

If you expand the scope of the definition of information to be a specific state of the universe at a point in time, including its complex members (ie us and our consciousness), and remove the temporal importance of "now" then we are all information about states of the universe at varying points in its existence.

The point at which even that basic information (the current unique state of the universe) becomes erased or irrelevant (ie heat death when there is a perfectly homogenous distribution of energy throughout the universe) is quite interesting and depressing. At that point any record of the past and the ability to discern one moment of time from the next is gone. With no variation in the universe even time itself becomes impossible to measure unless your an objective viewer of the universe (God?).