It is possible to overwrite your free disk space on Mac with zeros or random numbers to securely hard drive and prevent data recovery. ![]() You can replace -s (single-pass erase) with -m to make it a seven-pass erase or -z to overwrite with zeros. Where rm is file removal command and rP is a request to overwrite the deleted files followed by the location of the file or folder you want to remove. Secure removal is not an exception, as you can securely erase data and Empty Trash on Mac using dedicated commands: The macOS command line in the Terminal app allows you to do many tasks that are not available in the GUI. Right-click on the icon and select Empty Trash.įinder Preferences > Advanced III.There are four different ways to remove files directly from Trash. While these ways may not seem as easy as Secure Empty Trash was, they are still solid substitutions if you follow the instructions correctly. For example, you can use Terminal commands or third-party software to delete files. There are some workarounds on securely removing files on OS X Mac Ventura. Secure erase of the hard disk drive is also recommended when you sell or donate your Mac. Secure Empty Trash on Mac is needed when you want to completely remove important documents or sensitive data and prevent its recovery. By scanning the entire internal hard disk drive, professional Mac data recovery software can restore those files until they are overwritten. When you Empty Trash on Mac, the system simply removes the index entry of the file, leaving it in a hard drive location. Reasons to Secure Empty Trash on MacĮven though Apple has removed the Secure Empty Trash, many users still need to delete files on Mac securely. We will talk about different ways to delete files below in this guide. Starting from this version, users could use only the traditional way to empty Trash on Mac. Unfortunately, Apple has discontinued Secure Empty Trash with the release of OS X El Capitan. You had to right-click the Trash icon and press the Command key to enable the ‘Secure Empty Trash’ functionality. Deleted files were overwritten with zeros making it almost impossible to recover the data. With the default Secure Empty Trash feature on a Mac, it was possible to remove data from Trash securely. How to Restore Accidentally Removed Files.Many of these APFS snapshots will be automatically deleted after about a week or after TM sends the backup to the external TM drive. These APFS snapshots are used by macOS and various backup utilities like Time Machine. If you are using macOS 10.13+ and the APFS file system, then the files you deleted may still exist within an APFS snapshot. The command returns Thinned local snapshots: I found a date in /Volumes//Backups.backupdb/MacbookPro I not only had to remove TimeMachine local snapshots, but also thin local backups: Not sure if this was necessary but after completing this process, I ran disk first aid on the APFS container itself and the individual volumes. Repeat the whole process several times until you no longer see space increases. Select your main volume again and you will probably see the “available” space has increased. ![]() Select the new volume (double checking you’ve selected the right one!) and click - Volume in the toolbar to delete it.Set the new volume’s reserved space to slightly under the supposed “available” amount of space (the max space and name don’t matter) and save.Click the + Volume button in the toolbar.Select your main hard drive volume and take a note of the claimed available space.Please do a full backup to an external drive before trying this. Note that this method only applies to APFS-formatted drives which use volumes rather than true partitions (and I suspect the problem is caused by some bug in APFS).ĭisclaimer: while this seemed to work for me without issues, it’s messing with fundamental parts of the system in a non-reversible way, and should be a last resort (also might not recommend for less technical users). ![]() What worked for me was repeatedly adding and deleting a volume reserving nearly all the “available” space, which appeared to trigger updates to the APFS free space calculations. Several other solutions also didn’t work. I don’t use Time Machine, and the handful of local snapshots I somehow had weren’t very large. After deleting many GB of files, almost no space would be freed. This happened to me on Mojave, specifically with an APFS-formatted 512GB SSD with an extra volume besides the main one.
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