Trash taking too long to empty !!

I have about 800mb of data in my trash, i "empty secure trash" but it is taking too long to empty. i have a 1.6ghz powermac g5 with 1.2gigs of ram. when i say too long: i left it emptying trash for over 3 hours and it was still emptying the trash with small progress being made, any ideas ?? neye:

secure empty trash will take a long time and tbh i never do a secure empty of trahs because it takes so long, not quite sure how the secure trash works but even if it 0's all the data it will take a while hence it saying 3 hours

yea i secure emptied once, never again because it took way too long, and i dont know if i really find the point for me.

Whenever you "Empy Trash" the normal way, the items in trash are simply "de-linked" from your system. They are still on your harddrive, but there's no easy way to access them. The data will eventually be written over by new data, but if someone *really* wanted to get at that info, they could. "Secure Empty Trash", like inflexion said, actually writes binary 0's over the deleted info so that there would be no way for a malicious person to get at your info. It's a good feature for people doing some private work, but for most of us Mac users it's just not a big deal.

On my PC, I use Eraser, which overwrites with different types of 0s, 1s, or pseudorandom data as many times as you want. I once overwrote an entire external hard drive over 1,000 times, and it took 3 days! lol

What was stated above is correct, If you are deleting important files I would recommend the secure delete. (files for like credit card numbers and bank statements) all other files I would just delete the regular way.

Remember, however, that some experts can recover data that has only been overwritten once. The US Dept. of Justice overwrites sensitive data 3 times, and super top secret data 7 times. An article by a data recovery expert named Gutmann argued that, unless you overwrite 35 times or more, data can still theoretically be recovered.

Yea, I watched a show on the Science channel about that. They can never recover all of the info, but they use an algorithm to figure out what was inbetween the missing bits of info.

Crazy stuff.

Yep. That is why, if I have something really sensitive, I overwrite it 16,525 times (Eraser's max), and just endure the time it takes. There is no way anyone could recover that lol.

How do you do the "secure empty." Sorry if its a stupid question im new at all this.

Click on the Trash and click "Finder" on top, and one of the choices should say "Secure Empty Trash"

Thanks for your help

your welcome.

caveatipss said:

Remember, however, that some experts can recover data that has only been overwritten once. The US Dept. of Justice overwrites sensitive data 3 times, and super top secret data 7 times..

Click to expand...

Both the DOJ and DOD follow this policy (it is a DOD guideline btw, U.S. Government DoD (5220.22M)). OSX does meet approved DOD standards for security in this area, because of the secure empty trash feature.

From HERE:

Mac OS X 10.3 and later actually provide the ability to securely delete files. Simply move the files in question to the Trash, and then choose Finder Secure Empty Trash. Not only will the files currently in the Trash be removed from your hard drive’s directory but the blocks on your drive on which those files resided will also be overwritten seven times with random ones and zeros in order to prevent them from being recovered. (According to Apple’s Mac OS X Product Manager, “This method follows the U.S. Department of Defense standard for the sanitization of magnetic media in ‘DoD 5220- 22-M: National Security Program Operating Manual.’” In other words, it should be good enough for you and me.)