Basics4Mac - Secure Empty Trash and Time Machine

Some important warnings about deleting files

I occasionally get emails from people wanting to know how to recover files from the Trash after it has been emptied. It isn't cheap to do, but there is software out there that will reconstruct files that have been Trashed. I've even had emails from people who want to know how to recover files from Secure Empty Trash. Well, the whole point of Secure Empty Trash is to make files impossible to recover. The NSA might be able to help, but other that, you are out of luck.

Using Time Machine for your backups, however, changes everything.

If you aren't using Time Machine, you are still making regular backups (right? right?) of your hard drive. But depending on how often your regular backups were, your Trashed file might or might not be available for recovery. If you Trash a file newer than your most recent backup and immediately realize you made a huge mistake, you are out of luck.

Time Machine, however, is happily working in the background making backups for you every hour for the current day. It then keeps daily backups for a month. I'll bet you tons of money that that is alot more often than you would be making manual backups.

Now, if you Trash a file, as long as it is more than an hour old, you can just go to Time Machine and get it back.

But, aye, there's the rub. What if you wanted to get rid of that file forever? Time Machine still has a copy of it. And what about Secure Empty Trash? Yep, Time Machine will recover that file in the blink of an eye.

So what to do? The answer is not at all obvious, but here it is:

Activate Time Machine.
Locate the file that you deleted that you want gone forever and select it.
Go to the gear button in the tool bar and select "Remove from Time Machine"

Does Remove from Time Machine do a secure delete (writing zeros over the file many time to make it unrecoverable)? As near as I've been able to find out, the answer is no. It just does a regular delete that could be recovered using the kind of software I mentioned at the beginning of this tip.

If you regularly need to use Secure Empty Trash, then Time Machine may not be the best backup option for you. Stick with regular backups to an external hard drive that you can physically secure.

Related Items: Time Machine | Trash

Secure Empty Trash and Time Machine | 3 comments |

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Secure Empty Trash and Time Machine

Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, February 13 2011

What if I emptied my trash bin, which I do routinely, not expecting much to be there and without looking first to see what files were there, and I notice it's deleting 230 files? (!) I am not sure what those files were, but I was not expecting there to be 230, which tells me perhaps I moved something to the Trash Bin accidently. The problem is, I don't know what files were in the Trash Bin, so I can't search for them specifically in my Time Machine backups. Can I look at the Trash Bin from a couple of hours ago by using Time Machine? I tried doing that, and I can find where the trash bin is! When using Time Machine, I can't see a dock, which is the only placed I'd noticed that the Trash Bin appears, but it must be someplace on the hard drive. How do you navigate to it within a Time Machine backup? Thanks!

Reply to This

Authored by: chrisb on Monday, February 14 2011

Very interesting question!

After playing with Time Machine myself and doing some research, it appears that Time Machine does not backup the Trash.

On thought though about seeing many more files deleted than you thought were in the Trash:

Many files are what are called "Packages" A Package is a special kind of folder that looks like a file. In fact, a package can be made up or dozens or hundreds of files. When the Trash does a count down of files it is deleting, it actually counts down all the hidden files inside of packages.

Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, February 22 2011

Thanks for the information! Thankfully, so far, whatever those files were, they don't appear to be anything I need. But now I'm actually looking at what's in the trash bin before emptying it. ;)