#HOW TO ENABLE SECURE EMPTY TRASH MAC MAC#
The easiest way to securely delete any sensitive data on your Mac is by using Secure Empty Trash. In the case of an accidental data loss, depending on how large your hard disk is, the previous “deleted” files may be overwritten in a few seconds, a few days, or even a year, so it’s sometimes possible to recover an accidentally deleted file using the unlinked data present.īut it also means that a thief could potentially access the files you may have deleted, or reselling a Mac with data you thought you had deleted may have bad consequences. This is a good thing as well as a bad thing. When the time comes to store a new file, OS X simply overwrites the space previously taken up by the unlinked (deleted) file. That is why deleting files frees up disk space. Once the data blocks have been removed from a file, OS X treats it as unused storage.
#HOW TO ENABLE SECURE EMPTY TRASH MAC FREE#
Why Does Your Disk Space Free Up After File Removal? However, even if you can’t find them, they still exist on your hard drive, at least for a little while. What that basically means is the underlying data in a file is dissociated/removed from the names and parent folders that used to lead to them, hence they don’t exist in a particular place, and OS X can’t identify them. Under the hood, only the file system links to files in the Trash are removed. It’s a general observation that when you click on “Empty,” you can no longer see the files, hence you think that they have been “deleted/erased.” In fact, they aren’t really gone. Here you can see everything you’ve moved to the Trash drag out files to recover them or click the “Empty” button. Whenever you click on the Trash icon present in your Dock, OS X opens the Trash folder.
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OS X simply moves the file(s) from their original location into a separate folder named “Trash” and found in your user directory “/.Trash.” No files are deleted, no entries are removed, and more importantly, no disk space is freed up. What Happens When You Delete a Fileįirst, let’s go into detail a bit regarding what happens when you click “Move To Trash.” That’s exactly what happens in the background OS X moves the selected file(s) to the Trash folder on your Mac.
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We’ve previously mentioned Apple’s Filevault, which you can use to secure/encrypt your files, but if you find the need to delete your sensitive data, then you can follow any of the methods detailed below.