How to completely delete trash on mac book pro?

M

michaelobrien

Registered
Please help: When I delete files on my mac book pro, i generally grab a file and put it in the trash and click on 'secure empty trash'..after that...i have a quick search for any duplicate files on my Hard drive and also delete those with secure empty trash, whether I delete photoshop files, jpegs or any other files, my hard drive space seems to go down fast when I creat a new file, but when I trash the file I never get the same amount of space back! For example, today I had 84.74GB of HD space and was doing some work and by the evening it was down to 84.15GB after editing images on photoshop...when I saw this, I deleted the larger files I created, and didnt get back much of the space I deleted!!! Am I doing something wrong??? Surely theres a way to get back this space back... ??? Thanks for any help. :)
 
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No, I have filevault switched off! Its just annoying because at times i may do some work and it eats up maybe 2GB (which in itself surprises me because im not doing that much to justify 2GB) but when I go to delete the files created, all that I can find, I may only get 300mb back from the 2GB trashed through securely emptying it!!! Im no whizz on the computer, tech wise, but I figured that if you dump it securely that you should get a majority of that space back?!
 
The 600 or so MB that you don't see return in your example could be a variety of sources, not just the files that you deleted. Seems that these days that's a pretty small amount to be concerned about.
It may simply be a caching issue, or other temp files - the result of various saves, or perhaps photoshop scratch files somewhere.
Do you get normal space back if you simply restart?
Do you occasionally (maybe every few months) boot to your OS X installer, and run Disk Utility/Repair Disk (different from Repair Disk Permissions)?

My last thought - do you have a real need to "Secure Empty trash"? I know there can be security issues, but that particular action does not make more space available (compared to a simple 'empty trash), it's simply a more secure choice - and takes longer. Not much help really, if you don't truly have security needs, over the standard empty.

My suggestions, if the free space on your hard drive is a concern, is to:
Restart.
Run one of the various utilities that can clean out your various caches/temp files/log files
One that I use is YASU. Many folks also like OnyX, or AppleJack has also been around for a long time, and a good tool, too.
Then (again) occasionally check your hard drive directory with Disk Utility. You can't do this while booted to the system, so boot to your OS X installer, and you can run Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.
 
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