Sunday, September 6, 2009

Does Snow Leopard take forever to empty the trash?

Tech Note by: Steven Combs, Ph.D.
On every upgrade of Snow Leopard in Doc’s house, we've had a bit of a problem. Emptying the trash would take FOREVER. And then it donned on me. This smacks of the secure empty trash feature of OS X. You know, that mode that will scrub your hard drive with 20 grit sandpaper to ensure the file cannot be restored. Well, that method takes time - a lot of time.

After a bit of snooping around in Finder, I found that the Snow Leopard upgrade enabled secure empty trash as the default. We need to change that...that is unless you have something to hide. Is that a guilty look on your face? Here's how to fix our over protective Mac:

  • Ensure the Finder is active
  • From the Finder menu, select Finder | Preferences... {or you can hit ⌘,} – the Finder Preference window will appear
  • Click the Advanced icon in the top menu of the Finder Preferences window – the Finder Preference window will change as shown below

  • Uncheck the Empty Trash securely option
  • Close the Finder Preferences window
Your Mac will now empty the trash at blistering speeds, unlike Doc the night before trash pickup. Did you notice the problem? Is this happening to anyone else but me? Drop me a comment and let me know.
Notebooks:

2 additions to this Tech Note.:

  1. There are two issues. The one you covered (Snow Leopard selecting "Secure Empty Trash" as the default setting) is relatively trivial. The bigger issue is why Snow Leopard is much, much slower than Leopard when securely trashing files. The rumor is that Snow Leopard performs more disk overwrites, but I've seen nothing from Apple to confirm this.

    ReplyDelete

  2. Everybody suggests uncheck secure empty, but I never had it checked in the first place, and snow leopard still takes ages to empty thrash. Nobody deals with the issue of it being slower to empty ever though secure thrash is not checked. ????????

    ReplyDelete

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