Emptying out the trash from my macbook

[Wilson]

Hello Gang,

I need some wisdom! I am deleting an old MacBook back up from a Glyph drive. However, the back up is over 800,000 items (Mac labels everything to be deleted as "items") and at the current rate is going to take over a week to secure empty everything. Is there a way to speed up the process of emptying out the trash?

My laptop is a MacBook, not a MacBook Pro.

Thank you all for your bits!

[kslight]

Pull anything you want to keep off the drive (is there anything you want to keep???).

Then go to Applications -> Utilities -> Disk Utility -> Select the Drive -> Erase

[Wilson]

kslight, you da man. Thank you!!

[analogika]

That's not a secure delete, though. That just deletes the directory, exactly the same as when you simply trash something in the Finder.

If you want to *secure* delete something, that simply takes time. Every bit has to be erased, overwritten, erased again, overwritten, etc.

If you don't have the time for that (nor a second machine that could perform the duty while you're working away on the main box), pull everything off the drive that you want to keep and use a large hammer or a power drill to "secure delete" the rest.

[Osumosan]

^^like.

Secure delete by deleting. Only the NSA can recover deleted stuff. Try it. Delete your files and try to recover them if you want to feel safe.

[kslight]

He asked for a faster way, not a more secure way?

I suppose if we are talking about the best of fast and secure, we would be taking power tools to our hard drives.

But that isn't exactly cost effective, and most of us do not require that level of secure data removal.

Formatting is mighty practical, and if he is (presumedly) erasing the backup disk for the purpose of reusing it, eventually those "unsecure" bits will get overwritten anyway.

If you've got serious concerns about someone breaking into your home to steal a Glyph hard drive for the purpose of recovering your (audio?) backup data, you've obviously got much bigger problems than I do, and in that case I think you should probably consider changing your identity, relocating your family, and invest in a security system, firearms, and offsite data storage?

IOW, if you are paranoid, formatting is not going to allow you to sleep at night.

For everyone else, whose hard disks are not full of sensitive government secrets, formatting is a fast and effective way to blank slate a hard drive for reuse.