Deleting files VERY slow

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Level 2

352 points

Deleting files VERY slow

If I go into Finder to delete a bunch of files, it takes forever. If I select 20 or 50 oor 100 files, it makes difference ... it's very, very slow. Anything I can do to speed this up?

MacBookPro (Intel), Mac OS X (10.7.2)

Posted on Oct 29, 2011 2:15 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

astrodog73

Level 1

14 points

Oct 29, 2011 2:30 PM in response to Roger Barre

What do you mean by delete - moving to trash, or emptying trash?

If emptying trash is really slow you probably have 'empty trash securely' selected - this takes a while.... deselect it in Finder preferences and it will be fast.....

If moving to trash is very slow, then I can't help sorry....

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Answer 2

Oct 29, 2011 2:37 PM in response to Roger Barre

hi roger, i have seen this before on a Mac that was doing "secure empty trash" instead of a normal empty trash. on this particular Mac, the normal empty trash command was also missing from the Finder menu and i think i fixed that by deleting the Finder pref plist and rebooting.

HTH.

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Answer 3

Roger Barre Author

Level 2

352 points

Oct 31, 2011 10:18 PM in response to astrodog73

Sorry for not being clearer. I mean deleting - moving items to the trash. "Empty trash securely" is not selected.

Here's some more info ... sometimes doing a Force Quit on Finder and making Finder relaunch helps speeds things up, but then it slows down again pretty quickly.

So I opened up Activity Monitor and saw that Dropbox was eating up 40-50% of CPU. I shut down Dropbox and that speeded things up. I have no idea why Dropbox would slow down deleting files that were not in the Dropbox folder, but there it was.

Any thoughts?

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Answer 4

@..@

Level 1

0 points

Mar 22, 2014 12:24 AM in response to Roger Barre

I also have this question too. You can go to finder in the menu bar > preferences > advanced > unchecked the " empty trash securely".

Roger Barre wrote:

If I go into Finder to delete a bunch of files, it takes forever. If I select 20 or 50 oor 100 files, it makes difference ... it's very, very slow. Anything I can do to speed this up?

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Answer 5

Mar 1, 2015 4:51 PM in response to Roger Barre

DId you find a solution? Thanks.

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Answer 6

May 14, 2016 7:13 AM in response to Roger Barre

I had the same problem. Until I closed the finder window with the files. I think the file preview in finder is slowing down the deletion process.

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