Secure erase of the hard disk drive is also recommended when you sell or donate your Mac. Secure Empty Trash on Mac is needed when you want to completely remove important documents or sensitive data and prevent its recovery.

By scanning the entire internal hard disk drive, professional Mac data recovery software can restore those files until they are overwritten. When you Empty Trash on Mac, the system simply removes the index entry of the file, leaving it in a hard drive location. Reasons to Secure Empty Trash on MacĮven though Apple has removed the Secure Empty Trash, many users still need to delete files on Mac securely. We will talk about different ways to delete files below in this guide. Starting from this version, users could use only the traditional way to empty Trash on Mac. Unfortunately, Apple has discontinued Secure Empty Trash with the release of OS X El Capitan. You had to right-click the Trash icon and press the Command key to enable the ‘Secure Empty Trash’ functionality. Deleted files were overwritten with zeros making it almost impossible to recover the data. With the default Secure Empty Trash feature on a Mac, it was possible to remove data from Trash securely. How to Restore Accidentally Removed Files.

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