From Mac OS X 10.6.8 to macOS 10.10, there is a Secure Empty Trash feature to securely delete files placed in the Trash. But Apple remove this feature in macOS 10.11 El Capitan because Apple can’t guarantee secure deletion on Solid-state Disks (SSDs) and USB Flash drives (learn more from the security content of OS X El Capitan v10.11). If we have some privacy photos and files in the Trash , how to safely delete them from the Trash on Mac with macOS 10.11 and later and the latest Catalina?
Do we need to securely delete private files on my Mac?
If you use an HDD as a macOS boot disk, there is no doubt that it is necessary to safely delete files. But many Mac users may discuss whether it is necessary to safely delete files on the SSD macOS boot disk.
And some of them say that all deletions are secure on a mac SSD system because of SSD is different from how HDD works. All storage space on SSDs and USB flash drives is divided into blocks, when a file is written to the disk drive, it’s assigned to a certain block or set of blocks. If you wanted to overwrite the file, then all you would have to do is tell the disk to overwrite those blocks. It is difficult.
This is misleading unless you turn on full disk encryption. Otherwise, overwriting files on a SSD drive is difficult, but it's not impossible. Non-secure erase will only get rid of the pointer to the contents of the file on the disk ... if a utility reads the SSD in the correct location, the contents will still exist, it's same as HDD. (learn more about SSD and USB flash data recovery software). Secure erase does not overwrite the same physical memory in the SSD, but at least reads to the same logical location on the disk will no longer have content.
Therefore, if you do not enable full disk encryption, it is still necessary to securely delete files on SSDs and USB flash drives.
How to securely delete private files or empty Trash on my Mac?
Here we recommend to use Better Trash — Secure Delete feature, which supports the safe deletion of files from Macs with HDD or SSD drives.
1. Download and install the free version of Better Trash on Mac.
2. It’s a menu bar application at the top of the computer. Click the Better Trash icon in the menu bar and choose the Secure Delete menu item in the pop-up menu.
3. Then choose the privacy file or folder, and click "open" button to continue.
4. Click the "Erase" button to start safe deletion of the selected file.
In addition to this feature, it also supports functions such as customizing the time and capacity of emptying the trash, viewing the original path of the trash files, and so on.
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