I Have been trying to securely empty my trash - 34,210 items - and a graph bar appeared four hours ago, but it still only shows about a millimeter of blue. I suspect the program has got stuck, but I can'tfind a way of stopping and starting again. I am using a MacBook Pro (15 inch, mid 2012).
THe hard drive does appear to be working. Can anyone advise me on what to do next?
MacBook Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10.4)
It can take a very long time, hours is possible. Why do you need to securely empty the trash?
AsCsound1 said a long time. It is a function of how much storage is being deleted. A secure delete will over write every block of every deleted file 7 times with a secure erase pattern. That takes a lot of time. And puts a lot of wear and tear on your disk.
If you are truly worried about someone accessing deleted files, then you should use System Preferences -> Security -> FileVault whole disk encryption (being very careful to never loose your encryption key). Then when you delete a file, it is already a bunch of random bits, as the key to unlock that file is trashed as well. No need to secure erase files on a whole disk encrypted file system.
It has to overwrite each file with random zeros and ones seven times, that's why.
Secure erase overwrites the files with a single pass as described on page 8-9…
http://training.apple.com/pdf/osx_wp_security_108.pdf
(10.8 seems to be the last update to this document)
A normal delete will only remove the reference to the files so it is faster, but the data could be recovered from disk.
If you delete many small files the disk will need to seek to the files, adding to the time needed (SSD's don't have a long seek time).
I think your safest option is to wait - it will finish eventually.
You can force the Finder to quit but that may cause the current file to remain on disk. You need to decide if the files really need to be securely erased.
Because I stupidly left the setting the way I found it, not knowing it was going to take so long. However thank you all for your answers. So now I just wait until it finishes....and never do it this way again
THank you all very much for your speedy responses.
you could just stop it, click the x next to the progress bar.
I Have just done a rough calculation and it looks like it will take NINE DAYS to finish this. it's taking about 25 seconds to do each file and there are over 34,000 of them.
They are just photographs which I wanted to delete to make more room on my computer. Not important files at all.
So how do I go about getting finder to quit ??
The secure empty progress normally has a cancel button, but I have found that it can simply cause it to pause on the cancel progress bar for hours instead. Try that first anyway, give it 10 minutes or so 🙂
To force quit any app you hit cmd+alt+esc then select it in the list & click the Force quit button (it is also an option in the Apple menu).
It is normally quite safe as a last resort, but make sure you have saved all open documents in other apps first just in case.
Thank you very much. That took about 15 seconds And I have now got another 20 gbs on my HD.
🙂 no problem.
If you decide you need to remove the old data on disk the 'Erase free space' option in Disk Utility will do the same basic task with options to select how many overwrites happen. Encrypting is a better way to protect the data 'at rest' as mentioned by BobHarris.
But good idea to be booted elsewhere when doing the erase free space.
Secure empty used to be random 7 pass, maybe it's changed now.
Steve.bh wrote:
Thank you very much. That took about 15 seconds And I have now got another 20 gbs on my HD.
Are you trying to erase data, or regain space, what is the motive here?
How long does it take to securely empty trash?
