To do a particular task there are always a method and its alternative options available. Like to reach to the third-floor of a multi-storey building you can either use the elevator or stares. Talking about the computers, either you can do it through a keyboard or else the mouse scroll & click button will complete the task for you.

Trash in Mac OS X: Trash folder is a place where you keep your useless files & folders temporarily. It can be located in the Dock. Let’s learn How to trash a file, empty the trash and its alternate methods?

English: This is a logo for Mac OS. It is a historical logo. Its historical usage is as follows: This logo was created by the Apple Corporation for Mac-OS. It debuted with version 8 of the operating system. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

To trash a file, first select the file and with the right-click of the mouse choose the ‘Move to Trash’ option.

• Select a file & simply drag & drop it to trash folder.
• To move the file to trash with keyboard commands press: Command-Delete.
• To empty the trash folder either brings the mouse to the trash & with right-click hit the option ‘Empty Trash’.
• Another way of doing the same is ‘Shift-Command-Delete’.
• If you want to ‘Empty Trash without confirmation dialog’ use ‘Option-Shift-Command-Delete’.

The above steps are some of the ways to trash a file, empty the trash folder etc.

How to secure trash a file in Mac OS X? But first why secure trash a file?

In Mac OS 10.3 & later, there is an option to permanently delete a file from Mac so that no third person can ever retrieve the data even by the use of a Mac data recovery software. So, before choosing the secure trash always analyze the fact that data once trashed through this option won’t be recoverable by any means.

Again there are two ways to secure empty trash:

First) Goto finder menu & select Secure Empty Trash to permanently delete the data even from the hard drive. The space allocated to the file is immediately overwritten by meaningless data making it impossible for the recovery software to recover it.

Second) To always delete data from trash using secure trash, goto finder menu & select Preferences<<Goto Advanced tab<<You see the 4 options, check the last one which says ‘Empty Trash Securely’.

How to recover data from emptied trash folder?

Other than the secure trash option, if the files are normally deleted from the trash folder they can be recovered later by running a Mac file recovery tool. But let’s first understand……

How recovery software recovers deleted files from trash: In Mac or any other operating system, when a file is deleted permanently either from the hard drives or from the trash, although the users don’t find the actual file on the system but on the hard drive some information of the deleted file like header, file signature etc. still remains. A data recovery software with the help of its advanced scan engine & algorithms locates these files and on the basis of these files the deleted data is recovered back.

So, if you have unintentionally or accidentally deleted a file from the Mac OS trash folder (without secure trash), you can still brings back every piece of the deleted data by the means of using an advanced data recovery Mac tool.