How to Force the Mac Trash Can to Empty

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Jason former Mac genius and today we are going to talk about securely emptying our trash can. In system run I believe this was known as force quitting but there is something to know. If you have iTunes launched and you are playing a song and you try to throw that song away from your hard drive it won't let you empty it because the song is actually being used by the system. There is really no way to force quit or to force that trash to empty if it is being utilized by the system. So we are going to go up and create a couple of really simple folders up here, new folder, new folder and I am going to drag those to the trash and another way to do that I just hit command Z to undo and take those out of the trash. You do have one level of undo on the finder level and I am going to select those and contextual menu or right click and say move to trash which is also another way to do it. If you click on the trash can and hold you will see open or empty trash. I am going to empty this trash and that we do not have an undo of. Once you empty the trash you do not have an undo of. The file is still recoverable though so I am going to create a new folder and we are going to throw it away. Now I am going to go up here to the finder and we are going to go secure empty trash and when I do that I get a dialog box that is saying are you sure you want to erase the items in the trash permanently with using secure empty trash, you cannot recover the files. So if you do that what that is going to do, and you hear that little clever trash icon going, what that does is it allows the information that that file used to take, the place that file used to take, it allows that information to be written over so that is why it is unrecoverable. That is pretty much it. Emptying trash is pretty easy usually. Keep in mind that you want to do that on a consistent basis to keep your system clean and optimized. So I'm Jason, former Mac genius, and I will see you next time."