How To Securely Delete Files in Mac OS X

So you’ve finally recovered from St. Patty’s Day and decided to check out the photos taken during your night of shenanigans. Congratulations! You plug your camera into your Mac, upload the pictures and, lo and behold, you find dozens of potentially blackmail-worthy photos involving pints of beer, a little person dressed as a leprechaun, and a spool of duct tape. The photos need to be removed from existence pronto, and fortunately your Mac can help keep your shame away from curious eyes. Little known fact: When you send a file to Trash and then empty it, the file isn’t really gone; it still lives tucked away on your hard drive and can be recovered with the use of data-recovery software that’s remarkably simple to obtain. If you want to make sure that what’s trashed stays trashed, use this little tip.

1. Click on the Finder or Trash icons located on the Dock A window opens.
2. Click Finder->Secure Empty Trash. Alternately, you can just open Trash and click the “Empty Securely” button

Files deleted in this fashion are overwritten with gibber-jabber that will prevent them from being recovered. The secure empty process takes far longer to delete files than a non-secure delete. What would normally take a second or two may take minutes (or hours) depending on the size of the files. See how little the progress bar has moved in the photo below? That’s after 3 minutes of securely deleting. But you can’t put a time stamp on dignity, can you?

Do you have any tips or tricks that you’d like to share with the rest of the class?