Secure Empty Trash vs. Empty Trash

Hello,

When you empty the trash, the files are still physically there. But, the space they occupied is marked as available for use. So, they are not taking-up any space. That space is immediately freed, and made available for use by the next program or file that needs it.

But, because it is stored magnetically, that file can be retrieved by manually (or with a special program) going back and locating where that file was stored and re-assigning a name and a pointer to it.

The only difference between regular empty trash and secure-empty trash, is that the secure option will immediately over-write that deleted file's space with garbage a couple of times to make it more difficult for someone to recover (or undelete).

That is the only difference. Otherwise, the space is still storing magnetic information regardless of which method you use. But, it is not wasting space either way. The space is marked as free, and will be used as needed.

I hope this helps.

Let us know if you have other questions.


P.S., if you'd like, go ahead and click the "Helpful" or "Solved" buttons on any of the posts / replies above if you feel they were helpful or adequately answered your question.

Not a significant amount of hard disk space usually. Items that aren't security emptied will stay there on the hard drive, but will be pushed aside and eventually overwritten as new data gets written to the hard disk. Fragmentation is taken care of by Mac OS X on smaller files as this thread explains:

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/groupee/forums/a/tpc/f/8300945231/m/9900929295/p /1

Hello,

You're welcome. Glad you found it helpful.

Let us know if you have other questions.

Can you explain how I manually retrieve items from the trash after it has been emptied?

I may have accidently put the majority of my itunes files into the trash after a recent re-install. Yesterday all the music files in the itunes library that were loaded pre re-installation suddenly will no longer play (file path can not be found). I know there are problems with itunes but I suspect in this case, I had put what I thought was a duplicate music file into the trash and now it has been emptied and is the cause of this problem.

If you could explain how to try and locate these emptied trash files it would be most appreciated.



IMAC G5 Original Mac OS X (10.4.8) Itunes 6

IMAC G5 Original Mac OS X (10.4.8) Itunes 6

Hello OceanDweller,

Unfortunately, there is no "Un-Delete" option in OS X 10.4.x. The information you deleted is no basically gone forever.

But, there are a couple of commercial programs that can assist in recovering lost files. They tend to start at $100 and go up from there.

You can read about these tools in some of my previous discussions here:

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=3223816#3223816

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=3231058#3231058

I hope this helps.

Thank you. I can't afford that for now.

Hello,

That's understandable. Sorry that there isn't a simple and free solution.