What does the "Erase Free Space" function do?
in the disk utility, there is an option to erase free disk space.
what exactly does this do?
what exactly does this do?
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.2)
Question marked as
Best reply
From Disk Utility Help:
"When you delete files by emptying the Trash, Mac OS X deletes the information used to access the files but doesn’t actually delete the files. Although the disk space used by deleted files is marked as free space, deleted files remain intact until new data is written over them. As a result, deleted files can be recovered.
You can use Disk Utility to erase the free space used by deleted files by having zeros written over the space once, 7 times, or 35 times. If you have a lot of free space on your disk, overwriting the free space several times can take a long time.
Erasing free disk space does not erase the other files on your disk."
charlie
"When you delete files by emptying the Trash, Mac OS X deletes the information used to access the files but doesn’t actually delete the files. Although the disk space used by deleted files is marked as free space, deleted files remain intact until new data is written over them. As a result, deleted files can be recovered.
You can use Disk Utility to erase the free space used by deleted files by having zeros written over the space once, 7 times, or 35 times. If you have a lot of free space on your disk, overwriting the free space several times can take a long time.
Erasing free disk space does not erase the other files on your disk."
charlie
