When I securely empty the trash bin, suddenly there are over 26 thousand items to delete.

I should have been more clear with my words. I meant to say that there may be a possibility that thousands of items are present in her recycle bin as she mentioned that it was her old data like photos and assignments.

I think it does multi-pass erasing, where instead of just writing zeros once, it goes over the space on the drive and writes zeros (and possibly random garbling as well) to the file location several times. This is probably why it reports that it's erasing multiple files. It technically goes through an erase routine several times, to ensure the data is gone.

"Without secure delete, the file's index entry is the only thing that's erased. The data on the drive is left untouched but is open for writing over. And with secure delete its the other way round that is it completely deletes the file index entry as well as the file data on the drive."

Don’t you agree on this point of mine..... Thomas Reed.....??

Grane Duke wrote:

I think it does multi-pass erasing, where instead of just writing zeros once, it goes over the space on the drive and writes zeros (and possibly random garbling as well) to the file location several times. This is probably why it reports that it's erasing multiple files.

That is exactly what a multi-pass erase does, but that should not cause it to report erasing more files than a normal erase. It's simply a difference in how the erasure is accomplished. There is no reason whatsoever to avoid using secure erase on this basis.

I would agree with Thomas on this.

However, I added an empty folder and it reported it had 3 items to delete. It's not a byte count or something is it?

JockyMc wrote:

I would agree with Thomas on this.

However, I added an empty folder and it reported it had 3 items to delete. It's not a byte count or something is it?

No. That folder had some invisible items in it, which is usually completely normal. An example is the .DS_Store file that saves information such as how to display the folder's contents.

thomas_r. wrote:

That is exactly what a multi-pass erase does, but that should not cause it to report erasing more files than a normal erase. It's simply a difference in how the erasure is accomplished. There is no reason whatsoever to avoid using secure erase on this basis.

I Never said Not to use “Securely empty trash”. In fact, I would suggest to use it only to permanently delete very confidential or sensitive files ( Which aren’t much many a times) which shouldn’t be seen by others with the means of data recovery software. If the confidential file data is too large then the person can delete the files turn by turn meaning in small batches. Other than that if a person wants to delete ordinary files which wouldn’t hamper him by any way, then the person should only follow regular empty trash option just to save time.

The same incident like OP had happened with me several times, so from my personal experience I am commenting the post.

Thomas, before posting your comment I think you should have read my comment carefully in block letters.....

Grane Duke wrote:

The same incident like OP had happened with me several times, so from my personal experience I am commenting the post.

That just means something was wrong with your computer, and that may have no relation whatsoever to what is going wrong for Rebecca. Under normal circumstances, there will be no reported difference in file count between normal and secure erase. If there were a difference, that would be a symptom of a larger problem that would need to be addressed in some way other than changing the erase method.

Some unintended things maybe. But not everything.

Mac OS X contains at least 350,000 files counted the way "empty Trash" counts them, where ever 'file inside a Package' is counted as one more.

There was nothing wrong with my macbook Thomas.

Once, I tried to delete some old files using Securely empty trash and it took exceptionally long time to delete the files but got deleted at last due to multi- pass erasing method as I had mentioned earlier. So later I tried to delete the copy of same files using normal empty trash method and were deleted in couple of seconds.The count difference of the files was high enough during Secure trashing because the file index entry as well as the files on the hard drive were securely being trashed which justifies the high count difference.

Now, thats a normal behaviour of any Mac computer. Thats why I recommended Rebecca to use normal method if she thinks that those files are not so confidential or sensitive. I am Not against using "Securely empty trash" but it should be used wisely only when required.

I'm sorry, but your assumptions are just plain wrong. The "file index entry" is not being included in the file count; that makes no sense whatsoever. The reason the secure erase took longer is because the data on your hard drive was being overwritten, which takes much longer than just deleting a catalog entry.

However, I'm done trying to debate this with you. Rebecca and other readers can read what has been said and come to a conclusion on their own.

Yeah, I know it overwrites the data with some random garbled data making it tough to retrieve the data. I do agree with you on the time taken for deletion. It may be just what I thought Rebecca might be experiencing.

Anyways, even I don’t feel like debating any further. I apologise if I have been rude to you in any way. And yes let Rebecca and others Judge on their own.

Cheers.

You can just do the "regular" Empty Trash.

Then when it is done, use Disk Utility to Erase free space, securely, and in one pass, free space gets written over with pseudo-random 'trash' never to be seen again. This is faster because the free space 'clumps up' into larger blocks that can be over-written faster than the individual files one at a time.

Secure empty trash has nothing to do with it. The question is, what's in your trash? If you don't actually have 26,000 items in your trash, you may have some very serious problems with your hard drive, and could lose some or all of your data. If you do have 26,000 items, that's almost certainly a mistake that could result in a corrupt system or data loss. The possibility of data loss means you need to back up your data before you do anything else, if you haven't already.

After you have backed up, did you manage to restore your Utilities folder? If so, please run that Terminal command I suggested earlier. If not, your first step needs to be restoring your system to a normal state by reinstalling it.

Hi thanks for the notes. im having the same issues w my trash but this was after i updated my OS awhile back.

Gonna try the disk utility idea now.

Im in the same exact boat as our friend here from 2015.

I followed your instructions, and here are the lines showing in the terminal window:

Last login: Fri Dec 16 16:01:02 on ttys000

Stacey-Brookes-MacBook-Pro:~ StaceysKarma$

Stacey-Brookes-MacBook-Pro:~ StaceysKarma$ ls -al ~/.Trash

total 68520

drwx------ 16 StaceysKarma staff 544 Dec 16 15:56 .

drwxr-xr-x+ 18 StaceysKarma staff 612 Dec 16 11:39 ..

-rw-r--r--@ 1 StaceysKarma staff 21508 Dec 16 16:02 .DS_Store

-rw-r--r--@ 1 StaceysKarma staff 116898 May 20 2014 Photo on 5-20-14 at 1.52 AM #2.jpg

drwxr-xr-x 4 StaceysKarma staff 136 Apr 12 2016 Recovered files

drwx------ 37 StaceysKarma staff 1258 Apr 22 2016 Recovered files #1

drwx------ 47 StaceysKarma staff 1598 Apr 25 2016 Recovered files #2

drwx------ 49 StaceysKarma staff 1666 Apr 26 2016 Recovered files #3

drwx------ 14 StaceysKarma staff 476 Apr 27 2016 Recovered files #4

drwx------ 4 StaceysKarma staff 136 May 3 2016 Recovered files #5

drwx------ 14 StaceysKarma staff 476 Sep 28 23:38 Recovered files #6

drwxr-xr-x@ 4 StaceysKarma staff 136 Apr 12 2016 V2

-rw-r--r--@ 1 StaceysKarma staff 17466011 Jun 2 2016 Xee3.5.2 11-34-46-687.zip

-rw-r--r--@ 1 StaceysKarma staff 17466011 Jun 2 2016 Xee3.5.2.zip

drwxr-xr-x@ 3 StaceysKarma staff 102 May 20 2016 Xee³.app

drwxr-xr-x 7 StaceysKarma staff 238 Dec 16 15:57 iPhoto

Stacey-Brookes-MacBook-Pro:~ StaceysKarma$

(One time - I went to the Genius Bar and they said that I was downloading all of my E-mails information on my computer. I think I deleted all of these folders at that time though. )

Thank you for your help.

Stacey