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You are here: MacNN Forums > Software - Troubleshooting and Discussion > macOS > What is the difference between secure deleting trash and normal deleting?

What is the difference between secure deleting trash and normal deleting?
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iv_zar
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Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Australia
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Mar 25, 2005, 12:58 AM
 
What is the difference between secure deleting trash and normal deleting???
And which is the better to do???
iMac G5 (20"...oh Yeah) 1 Ghz RAM, 160 Ghz Hard Drive and dont forget the good looks
     
Big Mac
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Join Date: Oct 2000
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Mar 25, 2005, 03:41 AM
 
Secure Empty Trash overwrites the file(s), whereas Empty Trash just removes the entries in the filesystem so that they are no longer found by the system and may eventually be overwritten. The conventional Empty Trash is what allows some programs to try to recover deleted files, since they are not actually deleted in the strictest sense. Secure Empty Trash is powered by Unix tool srm. You can get some details about it from this MacOSXHints page or by opening the Terminal and typing the command man srm. It seems that a normal srm or Secure Empty Trash command applies a 35-pass Gutmann algorithm, which I assume means overwriting the file 35 times with random values.

If you just want to get rid of what's in the trash, you should just use the normal Empty Trash. If, on the other hand, there's sensitive data you don't want anyone (including you) to ever be able to recover, use Secure Empty Trash.
( Last edited by Big Mac; Mar 25, 2005 at 03:49 AM. )

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