Comments on: How to Always Secure Empty Trash

By: Felix

Felix — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 05:00:41 +0000

As i said before, another amazing simple post..

By: JK

JK — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 22:22:13 +0000

That sounds stupid.

By: Disable the Empty Trash Warning in Mac OS X

Disable the Empty Trash Warning in Mac OS X — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 18:11:35 +0000

[...] you’re in the Advanced Finder preferences, you might want to enable the always “Empty Trash securely” feature as well, just be aware that it makes the recovery of any data deleted practically [...]

By: rnoonan

rnoonan — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 14:14:19 +0000

This is not at all the same as “Secure Empty Trash.” There’s a reason it requires much more CPU time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srm_%28Unix%29

The -P switch is certainly an improvement over a simple rm. I’m not suggesting the above is a poor solution for everyone. But it’s not as thorough as secure empty trash.

By: mafro

mafro — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 11:00:34 +0000

In Lion (and possibly Leopard) when you right click the trash can, you can press Cmd to show the “Secure Empty Trash” option.

By: Lee

Lee — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 10:31:21 +0000

Doesn’t this just put a secure delete button in trash?

I prefer to leave the button as just “empty” for deleting safe files, as it’s overkill to use secure delete for those (& uses all the CPU). I choose “secure delete” from the finder menu when I really need it.

You can use a keyboard shortcut when this is enabled, though I prefer the above method.

By: Ben

Ben — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 00:54:09 +0000

A great tip there, and an equally great follow-up from Art Westin.
I’m just securely emptying my trash and it’s taking a while, so I’ll bear that line of script in mind for future removals.
Cheers.

By: Art Westin

Art Westin — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 17:11:50 +0000

I take a slightly different approach. I created a folder on my desktop called “Shredder” where I dump stuff I want to disappear permanently. When I get good and ready, I run a simple shell script that executes:

rm -Prv ~/Desktop/Shredder/*

which overwrites and then deletes everything I put in the shredder. (I suppose I could put an Automator or AppleScript icon on the desktop to do this, but so far this scheme is so simple that I haven’t.)

This works extremely fast, and only shreds really confidential stuff that you put in the Shredder.

By: Alex

Alex — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 13:37:51 +0000

I found that when the OS was empting the Trash Can it was taking up alot of CPU so I use a app called the Trash Can which over writes everything in the Trash Can seven times but does’nt take large amounts of CPU to cpmplete it’s task.