If this is coupled to a large number of files, and also if there are multilinked files to be managed, the expected delays for a large number of files will be further compounded by the system have to identify which files need to be securely deleted and which are multilinked files that will not have to be overwritten. Generally when you delete files using Secure Empty Trash the system will show each rewrite and subsequent empty as a separate file deletion, resulting in about seven times the number of files to delete as there are files in the trash. This feature will have the system not only remove a file's entry from the disk's directory, but also overwrite the file's physical location on disk seven times with random data, to prevent the files from being discovered by data recovery routines. The next reason for long trash emptying times is if you have the Finder's "Secure Empty Trash" feature enabled. Secure empty trash "Secure Empty Trash" can be enabled by default in the Finder preferences as well as in the Finder menu. As a result, the trash progress may appear to go slow or even stall. This results in most of the files on the disk being "multilinked" and resulting in a spider web of file associations in the Time Machine drive's directory.īecause of this, if you try to delete one of these backup instances, the system will have to check the multilinked file and unlink it in addition to managing a large number of files. Each backup instance for Time Machine will contain all the files needed to restore your system, and in order to do this without making copies of all the unchanged files between backups, the system will create a hard link in the file system directory for each unchanged file. One situation where this might occur is if you manually remove Time Machine backups when troubleshooting Time Machine. In addition to packages and other instances of large numbers of files, the system will also take a little longer when managing multilinked files.
For instance, package files on the system may include numerous subdirectories and files that each will have to be deleted if you remove the package itself. When items are deleted, the system will access their entries in the disk's directory and remove them, so the time it takes to remove a file that is 1MB should be the same as it takes to remove a 1TB file.Įven though this is the standard behavior, there are some situations where you may end up removing far more files than what appeared in the trash. The time it takes to remove files depends primarily on the number of items being deleted, and at least for the standard trash emptying routine, the size does not matter. Normally this will only take a few minutes and there is some indication that the trash process is working, such as the number of calculated items increasing, or the progress bar moving across the window however, sometimes the progress window may appear to hang. To deactivate it, simply follow the same procedure again and uncheck the “Empty Trash Securely” box.When you empty the trash in OS X, the system will usually present a progress bar showing the number of files remaining to be removed if the number of items in the trash take longer than a moment to delete.
#Secure empty trash mac os x el capitan software
If you aren’t so keen on using the software to securely delete your data from your Mac computer, you can at least use the inbuilt function on your Mac computer.
Better still, you can simply right-click on the file you’d like to shred and select “File Shredder” > then select “Secure delete files.”