Should i secure empty trash mac

Be careful, you can't un-shred an important file. Finally, there is a way to delete files immediately, without putting them into Trash first. This is not a secure deletion doesn't overwrite files — but rather analogous to emptying the Trash. Highlight a file you'd like to delete. Click File in the top menu. Hold down the Option key.

Now you know how to securely erase files on macOS. And, hopefully, your Terminal experience hasn't been too stressful. For easier options, there are many free tools you can use. How To. Hit Return or Enter to search. Igor Degtiarenko. Writer and blogger at MacPaw, curious just about everything. Did you enjoy this post? Subscribe Now. April 07, Updated: September 13, CleanMyMac X. Free Download. Subscribe to know first Our delivery owl will bring you our best deals and news about MacPaw apps.

There, push the Secure Empty Trash button. The developers wanted to avoid the unnecessary wear and tear that the Secure Empty Trash option caused for hard drives and SSDs. Instead, the Delete Immediately option was introduced. Then, press Delete in the pop-up window. After the procedure is finished, the deleted files will be overwritten as meaningless data. Make sure you run this procedure before selling, donating, or lending your computer to anyone.

Technically, it might be possible to decrypt the data even after you apply the Secure Empty Trash feature. But this will require a high-profile hacker who normally works for governments or international criminal structures. The process of manually selecting the unnecessary items and deleting them either with or without the possibility of restoring might be quite time-consuming.

To automate this procedure, you may want to choose the Secure Empty Trash option as your default behavior:. This way, each time you empty the trash bin no items can be restored later. So please be twice as careful in order not to delete the necessary information. Another way to optimize the cleaning process is to install specialized software — such as MacKeeper , for example. This app will run a deep scan of your device, detect the junk files in all the locations, and get rid of them.

It will uninstall useless programs and plugins by not just removing them to the Trash but also emptying the trash bin.

Before erasing anything, MacKeeper will ask for your approval and confirmation. All your private data and system files remain intact. Searching the disk will tell you if the data is present in plaintext, but it won't tell you if some program has compressed or otherwise coded references to it.

Also, be careful that the search itself does not leave a record! The probability that the file's contents may persist is lower, but not impossible. If you want to throw a piece of hardware away or sell it on eBay, you'll want to make sure no one can retrieve your data from it. So, before selling or recycling a computer, be sure to overwrite its storage media with gibberish first.

And even if you're not getting rid of it right away, if you have a computer that has reached the end of its life and is no longer in use, it's also safer to wipe the hard drive before stashing the machine in a corner or a closet. Darik's Boot and Nuke is a tool designed for this purpose, and there are a variety of tutorials on how to use it across the web including here.

Some full-disk encryption software has the ability to destroy the master key , rendering a hard drive's encrypted contents permanently incomprehensible. Since the key is a tiny amount of data and can be destroyed almost instantaneously, this represents a much faster alternative to overwriting with software like Darik's Boot and Nuke, which can be quite time-consuming for larger drives.

However, this option is only feasible if the hard drive was always encrypted. If you weren't using full-disk encryption ahead of time, you'll need to overwrite the whole drive before getting rid of it. There are inexpensive shredders that will chew them up. Unfortunately, due to the way SSDs, USB flash drives, and SD cards work, it is difficult, if not impossible, to securely delete both individual files and free space.

As a result, your best bet in terms of protection is to use encryption. At this point in time, we cannot provide a good general procedure that will definitely remove your data from an SSD. At a high level, wear leveling works as follows.