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diegoemme

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 5, 2011
2
0
Hi everybody,
I have just made a clean install of Lion because the upgrade had resulted in an extremely slow (almost unusable) MacMook. I have migrated few selected things through Migration assistant (iPhoto Library, iTunes Library, few docs). Since I wanted the present installation to be as "clean" as possible I imported my old user (lets call it A) and then I moved the libraries and the docs from A to the Shared folder, I logged out from A, I logged in as B (the "clean" user) and copied the libraries and the docs. Everything worked fine. I then decided to delete user A from system preferences (checking the "secure" mode box). Well it is "deleting the account" since 30 hours. It this normal? If not, what should I do?
thank you very much
Diego
 

PCRanger

macrumors regular
Dec 12, 2006
121
0
London, UK
It depends how much stuff you ended up deleting... Using secure delete means the sectors are overwritten with zeros, or something similar. Therefore it will take longer than just a standard deletion, which just removes reference to the file and allows the sectors to be reallocated.
 

diegoemme

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 5, 2011
2
0
Thanks PCRanger... apparently it was normal. After about 60 hours it managed to delete all the accounts.
 

maflynn

macrumors Haswell
May 3, 2009
73,481
43,406
I avoid the secure ease options, mostly because my need for instant gratification supersedes my paranoia :eek:
 

HeroicEric

macrumors newbie
Jun 10, 2011
2
0
Is there any way to cancel this once it starts? I need to ship out this computer I just sold and I don't have 60 hours to wait for this to finish... It won't let me close System Prefs or shutdown/restart.
 
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