In this increasingly digital age that we all live in, we’ve grown accustomed to leaving electronic trails everywhere. Not that we have any choice, that is. Most of us realize that when we delete something from our computers- whether it’s an email, a picture, a document or something else – we may have physically removed it from our machine, but copies of it may live on in other places, for example on our employer’s backup server.
However, we often assume that the copy that we deleted from our computer is no longer on our computer. That isn’t true. No its not magic – remnants of the file are still on your computer, and in many cases it’s fairly easy to recover that file that you thought you deleted. While that may be handy when you deleted something accidentally, it may not be as useful when you’re trying to permanently delete a file. Emptying the trash doesn’t mean that the file is gone for good.
But if you use a Mac, the smart folks at Apple have given you a built-in option to make sure when you press delete, the file is gone. For good. Here’s how:
1) Simply click anywhere on your desktop so that the ‘Finder’ menu is displayed at the top of the menu bar.
2) Select Finder from the menu bar, and then select Preferences.
3) Click the Advanced button.
4) Check the box that says “Empty Trash securely”.
5) Close the Preferences window.
Now, when you open your Trash, you will see the option to empty the trash securely – which means that your Mac will delete the file and then overwrite the space that file originally occupied many times so that it cannot be recovered.
It will take longer to empty your trash this way – and you need to make sure that you really don’t need those files that you throw away – but you should have the peace of mind knowing that when you want to make something disappear from your Mac, there’s an easy way to do it that doesn’t require the skills of David Copperfield.
