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Level 1

12 points

Erasing free space

As a relative newbie, do you recommend erasing free space, and how would I do that?

I read about people using Onyx etc for security from web browsing, bank details etc. But does the erase free space do the same thing or just delete files, and not web history from Safari etc. Can I gather that deleting from Safari doesn't make it unrecoverable for sensitive details when you are using bank payments etc. Can anyone help here please. There are a million and one options to secure delete on Windows but I see little on a Mac, But if disk utility does the same thing.... or does it not touch Safari history etc..

MacBook Pro

Posted on Jan 16, 2012 6:12 PM

Best reply

WZZZ

Level 6

13,226 points

Posted on Jan 16, 2012 6:30 PM

Anything you delete or simply move to the Trash and empty normally, without using secure empty, is theoretically recoverable. What you are doing when you trash or delete an item is you are removing its known path from the system, but the underlying file is still there potentially recoverable... until it is actually overwritten by new data. You could use erase free space, but I am hesitant to do that myself since there have been glitches and problems associated with that. One is that it may create a huge temporary file which consumes all the free disk space and hangs things up pretty badly.

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16 replies

the tall Author

Level 1

12 points

Jan 18, 2012 4:51 PM in response to WZZZ

thanks, didn't know there was one on here , oops

Erasing free space