Permanently Delete Files on Mac

Wouldn’t you like to get rid of some or all files on your Mac forever? Whether for storage or resale. Maybe your Mac is too old to get the next OS version, or you have stored too much data on it and you’re worried that it might get compromised if it gets stolen.

The last thing you want is to see your data leaked by a hacker, leaving you vulnerable with no clue what to do next.

The good news is that you can permanently delete files from your Mac using a few methods that we’ll show you in this guide.

Can My Files Be Recovered When I Delete them?

The short answer is yes.

Data recovery technology has made it possible to recover and restore files; that means someone else can get back the files you deleted from the hard drive.

Most new Macs come with solid state drives (flash storage) instead of old spinning hard disk drives, or for some iMacs, Fusion Drives. This is a critical factor when it comes to securely deleting files on your Mac, as you won’t have to do this if it comes with an SSD.

If you have an older Mac, it probably has a regular HDD, but newer models with SSD allow you to use the standard method of moving files and emptying trash, compared to securely deleting files.

Unlike HDDs, where secure file deletion works, this is not the case with SSDs because overwriting a file only creates a new file in a new location, but does not overwrite the contents of the old file.

Fortunately, there are different methods you can use to permanently delete files on your Mac, be it old HDDs or SSDs.

Note: You can check the storage on your Mac by clicking the Apple logo at the top left of the screen and then going to About This Mac>Storage. Under the disk icon, you’ll see whether your Mac has a spinning HDD or an SSD.

Move Files to Trash

This is a tried and true method of deleting files on your Mac by dragging them to the trash. You can also use the Move to Trash feature by right-clicking on the file and selecting the option. From here you can go ahead and empty the trash.

Delete Now is a feature introduced by Apple with OS X (macOS) 10.11 El Capitan that bypasses the trash when you delete a file. It’s much faster than Move to Trash as you highlight your files and then use the Option-Command-Delete shortcut.

Alternatively, you can go to the Finder’s File menu and hold down the Option key to change the Move to Trash option to Delete Immediately. You will be asked to confirm the deletion, just like you did when using the Move to Trash option.

If you want to bypass the empty trash confirmation, go to your keyboard and press the Command-Option-Shift-Delete shortcut. This will bypass the dialog to confirm the deletion and empty the trash instantly.

If this is too difficult or cumbersome for you to remember, change the Finder preferences setting to cancel confirmation. Go to Menu>Preferences and under the Advanced tab uncheck Show alert before emptying Trash.

Safe Empty Trash

This is another simple solution to permanently delete your files from your Mac. It allows items to be deleted forever by overwriting random data multiple times.

This feature came with Mac OS X 10.3 Panther. It overwrites data seven times to increase security.

To use this feature, click the Finder menu and select Safe Empty Trash just below Empty Trash.

Use a Third-Party App

If deleting your files by emptying the trash doesn’t help, you can get a third-party app to force empty the trash. There are many such apps that can help you completely and permanently empty your trash, such as Permanent Eraser or Clean My Mac.

Use Mac Terminal

Mac’s Terminal is a command line tool that lets you easily complete tedious tasks like file deletion in just a few seconds. The program uses Unix commands to easily and quickly perform various functions without interfering with operating system operations. It is efficient and powerful as it helps you to remove files permanently easily.

But Terminal can also be dangerous if you haven’t used the command line. Before you start, learn some basic Terminal commands because any wrong command you enter can damage your system and you can easily delete files faster than you have time to stop the process.

The precision of each character, including capital letters and spaces, is important when using terminal commands.

Follow the steps below to get started:

Stage 1: Open Finder and click Applications>Utilities>Terminal.

step 2: A prompt with $ (dollar sign) will appear in the new window. The command line you will see is ComputerName:CurrentDirectory ~Username$ and at the top is the word Bash, the Terminal language on Mac.

Stage 3: Type your command and press Return after each command to execute it, or copy and paste the command into the terminal window. Type rm and space, and then drag and drop the files you want to get rid of permanently into the Terminal window. Press Enter to remove forever.

note: If you want to remove the file even faster without dragging and dropping, you can also enter the path of the file in Terminal.

Easily Delete Files for Good

Before deleting files, make sure you have a backup of your data in case something goes wrong. Of course, we recommend that you familiarize yourself with Terminal as it can be extremely powerful at deleting files as the interface can suffer a glitch or be slow.

Next: Want to delete your iCloud storage from your Mac and iPhone? Our next article shows you all the steps you need to take to clean up your storage.