Mac Software Empty Trash On External Drive

For some reason, emptying the trash in OS X has always been a slow process, especially if you have a lot of files there. I tanked a huge folder that had over 10,000 items in it and it took a whopping 30 minutes to trash it!

Jul 14, 2017  Right click the trash can on your dock, then click “Empty Trash.” This might take a while, but you’ll have all of your free space once it’s done. Option Two: Use Curb to Empty Only One Drive’s Trash. If you’d rather not empty the drive on your primary hard drive, the free application Curb allows you to empty the Trash on a single. Jul 11, 2019  Solution: The best possible solution to resolve the Empty Trash problem on Mac-OS due to malware is by installing the Mac Antivirus Software Program. 2)Mac-Trash gets Empty due to the Mechanical Damages of hard drive. Internal or external damage on the Mac drive is another common reason for the documents loss from the Trash folder. Data storage. Connect the external hard drive, then empty the Trash icon present on the Dock to delete all the files in the.Trashes folders (including the external hard drive.Trash folder). In case you have accidentally lost Trash data from your external storage drive, deploy Stellar Data Recovery Professional for Mac.

There isn’t too much you can do about this since it’s the way the operating system works, but if you know how to use Terminal and aren’t afraid of it, then you can speed up the process.

The first thing you can do is to make sure you are not securely deleting your trash. This is an option in OS X that will completely overwrite the data that was stored where those deleted files were.

Basically, it makes sure that no data can be recovered once it has been deleted. Make money with these mac apps. Most people would not want this unless they are storing super sensitive information that they would not want anyone to be able to see even after the data has been deleted.

Go to Finder, then click on Preferences and then click on Advanced.

Make sure Empty Trash Securely is not checked. If you had that checked for any reason, it would take a lot longer to empty the trash. If this option wasn’t checked and emptying the trash is still slow, you can empty the trash using Terminal.

Note: The Empty Trash Securely option has been removed from OS X El Capitan and probably all future versions of OS X.

Empty Trash using Terminal

Open Terminal by going to Applications, Utilities and Terminal and type in the following command:

Mac Delete Trash On External Drive

Make sure you type it exactly as it appears above with no extra spaces or anything else. Using this command incorrectly can lead to deletion of files and folders you did not intend to delete. Canon mp210 series software mac.

Retrieve Empty Trash On Mac

Emptying the trash using the Terminal is significantly faster than the traditional method of using the GUI. Most of the time it’s probably not worth going into the Terminal, but if you have a huge amount of data that you just deleted, it might be worth the extra effort to save some time.

Mac Software Empty Trash On External Drive

Note that using this command in the terminal does not delete the trash that is from external hard drives or other partitions, just the local files on your Mac.

Mac Software Empty Trash On External Drive Windows 10

If this command is not working for you and the trash is not being emptied, you might have to run the command as sudo. To do that, just add sudo to the front:

When you use the sudo command, you’ll need to enter the password for the account in order for the task to complete. So if the trash won’t delete or you get an error message when trying to empty the trash, you can try this method to fix the issue.

That’s it! If you are having issues/problems with emptying the trash in OS X Lion or other thoughts, please post a comment here and let us know! Enjoy!