Secure Empty Trash

[giovanni.apd]

When I attempt to secure my empty trash through the Finder menu I am unable to due so. The text appears grey and unclickable. I have tried to do this from all accounts on the computer including the admin account and I have emptied the trash from each of these accounts.
Does anyone know what the problem might be or if there is any other way to go about this?

 

[yellow]

Open terminal, type:

which srm

Does anything come up?

 

[giovanni.apd]

sorry, i have no idea what you're talking about...
would you be able to walk me through this?

 

[yankeefan24]

Go to Applications --> Utilities --> Terminal

Then type in the code.

 

[giovanni.apd]

it says:

/usr/bin/srm

 

[yellow]

Hmm that's what it should say. "srm" is the command line tool for "secure remove", so there's no reason that it should be greyed out in your Finder pull-down menu.

Are you using any 3rd party haxies or other user interface enhancements that might be interfereing with it?

 

[tweakers_suck]

When I attempt to secure my empty trash through the Finder menu I am unable to due so. The text appears grey and unclickable. I have tried to do this from all accounts on the computer including the admin account and I have emptied the trash from each of these accounts.
Does anyone know what the problem might be or if there is any other way to go about this?

It is not clear to me from your original post, but do you have any items in your trash? Or are you trying to secure after emptying the trash? Secure Empty Trash only works when you actually have items in the trash that you want to delete securely.

 

[giovanni.apd]

oh ok, that explains it.
I thought that it deleted the data left over from trash that has previously been deleted.
Is there anyway to securely delete the remaining data from previously deleted file?

 

[jsw]

Open Applications->Utilities->Disk Utility.

Select your hard drive on the sidebar on the left ("Macintosh HD"), then select the "Erase" tab, then pick the "Erase Free Space..." button.

 

[smartalic34]

will "erasing free space" free up more hard disk space by any chance in addition to providing security?

 

[jsw]

will "erasing free space" free up more hard disk space by any chance in addition to providing security?

Nope.

Emptying the Trash will do that, as will emptying the cache on Safari, etc. But erasing free space won't do anything to free up disk space.