The Trash

No single element of the Macintosh interface is as recognizable or famous as the Trash can icon, which appears at the end of the Dock. (It’s actually a wastebasket, not a can. And in Yosemite, it’s made of white plastic instead of wire. This is progress?)

You can discard almost any icon by dragging it into the Trash can. When the tip of your arrow cursor touches the Trash icon, the little wastebasket turns black. When you release the mouse, you’re well on your way to discarding whatever it was you dragged. As a convenience, OS X even replaces the empty-wastebasket icon with a wastebasket-filled-with-crumpled-up-papers icon, to let you know there’s something in there.

GEM IN THE ROUGH: Opening Things in the Trash

Now and then, it’s very useful to see what some document in the Trash is before committing it to oblivion—and the only way to do that is to open it.

Trouble is, you can’t open it by double-clicking; you’ll get nothing but an error message.

Or at least that’s what Apple wants you to think.

First of all, you can use Quick Look (Quick Look) to inspect something in the Trash.

But if Quick Look can’t open the file—or if you want to edit it instead of just reading it—then drag the document onto the icon of a program that can open it. That is, if a file called Don’t Read Me.txt is in the Trash, you can drag it onto, say, the Word or TextEdit icon in your Dock.

The document dutifully pops open on the screen. Inspect, close, and then empty the Trash (or rescue the document).

It’s worth learning the keyboard alternative to dragging something into the Trash: Highlight the icon, and then press ⌘-Delete (which corresponds to the File→Move to Trash command). This technique is not only far faster than dragging, but it also requires far less precision, especially if you have a large screen. OS X does all the Trash-targeting for you.

Note

If a file is locked, a message appears to let you know; it offers you the chance to fling it into the Trash anyway. That’s a better solution than in older versions of OS X, when you were forced to unlock the file before you could trash it.

Rescuing Files and Folders from the Trash

File and folder icons sit in the Trash forever—or until you choose Finder→Empty Trash, whichever comes first.

If you haven’t yet emptied the Trash, you can open its window by clicking the wastebasket icon once. Now you can review its contents: icons that you’ve placed on the waiting list for extinction. If you change your mind, you can:

• Use the Put Back command. This feature flings the trashed item back into whatever folder it came from, even if that was weeks ago.

  You’ll find the Put Back command wherever fine shortcut menus are sold. For example, it appears when you two-finger-click the icon, right-click it, or click the icon and then open the menu.

  Tip

  The same keystroke you use to hurl something into the trash (⌘-Delete) also works to hurl it out again. That is, you can highlight something in the Trash and press ⌘-Delete to put it back where it once belonged.

• Hit Undo. If dragging something to the Trash was something you just did, you can press ⌘-Z—the keyboard shortcut for the Edit→Undo command. (The Finder offers a five-level Undo, meaning that you can retrace your last five actions.)

  Undo not only removes a file from the Trash, but also returns it to the folder from which it came. This trick works even if the Trash window isn’t open.

• Drag it manually. Of course, you can also drag any icon out of the Trash with the mouse, which gives you the option of putting it somewhere new (as opposed to back in the folder it started from).

Emptying the Trash I: Quick and Easy

If you’re confident that the items in the Trash window are worth deleting, use any of these three options:

• Choose Finder→Empty Trash.

• Press Shift-⌘-Delete. Or, if you’d just as soon not bother with the “Are you sure?” message, then throw the Option key in there, too.

• Right-click the wastebasket icon (or two-finger click it, or just click it and hold the mouse button down for a moment); choose Empty Trash from the shortcut menu.

The Mac asks you to confirm your decision. (Figure 2-11 shows this message.) If you click Empty Trash (or press Return), OS X deletes those files from your hard drive.

Tip

If you’d rather not be interrupted for confirmation every time you empty the Trash, you can suppress this message permanently. To do that, choose Finder→Preferences, click Advanced, and then turn off “Show warning before emptying the Trash.”

Figure 2-11. Top: Your last warning. OS X doesn’t tell you how many items are in the Trash or how much disk space they take up. Bottom: The Get Info window for a locked file. Locking a file in this way isn’t military-level security by any stretch—any passing evildoer can unlock the file in the same way. But it does trigger a warning when you try to put it into the Trash, providing at least one layer of protection against losing or deleting it.

Emptying the Trash II: Secure and Forever

When you empty the Trash as described above, each trashed icon sure looks like it disappears. The truth is, though, the data in each file is still on the hard drive. Yes, the space occupied by the dearly departed is now marked with an internal “This space available” message and, in time, new files may overwrite that spot. But in the meantime, some future eBay buyer of your Mac—or, more imminently, a savvy family member or office mate—could use a program like Data Rescue or FileSalvage to resurrect those deleted files. (In more dire cases, companies like DriveSavers.com can use sophisticated clean-room techniques to recover crucial information—for several hundred dollars, of course.)

That notion doesn’t sit well with certain groups, like government agencies, international spies, and the paranoid. As far as they’re concerned, deleting a file should really, really delete it, irrevocably, irretrievably, and forever.

OS X’s Secure Empty Trash command to the rescue! When you choose this command from the Finder menu, the Mac doesn’t just obliterate the parking spaces around the dead file. It actually records new information over the old—random 0’s and 1’s. Pure static gibberish.

The process takes longer than the normal Empty Trash command, of course. But when it absolutely, positively has to be gone from this earth for good (and you’re absolutely, positively sure you’ll never need that file again), Secure Empty Trash is secure indeed.

Tip

You can also direct the Mac to use this secure method all the time. To do that, choose Finder→Preferences, click Advanced, and turn on “Empty Trash securely.”

Locked Files: The Next Generation

By highlighting a file or folder, choosing File→Get Info, and turning on the Locked checkbox, you protect that file or folder from accidental deletion (see Figure 2-11 at bottom). A little icon appears on the corner of the full-size icon, also shown in Figure 2-11.

Locked files these days behave quite differently than they did in early OS X versions:

• Dragging the file into another folder makes a copy; the original stays put.

• Putting the icon into the Trash produces a warning message: “Item ‘Shopping List’ is locked. Do you want to move it to the Trash anyway?” If so, click Continue.

• Once a locked file is in the Trash, you don’t get any more warnings. When you empty the Trash, that item gets erased right along with everything else.

You can unlock files easily enough. Press Option-⌘-I (or press Option as you choose File→Show Inspector). Turn off the Locked checkbox in the resulting Info window. (Yes, you can lock or unlock a mass of files at once.)