I’ve always felt that the concept of the Trash on the Mac, or the Windows Recycle Bin, is one of the great inventions in computing. Prior to this, deleting files was all done via text commands, or by selecting files in a list, and you could still type the wrong file name or select the wrong file. It was easy to make mistakes and get rid of files that you didn’t mean to delete.
The Trash on a Mac is a sort of buffer. You move files there, but still have a chance to say Oops! You can delete the Trash immediately after you’ve placed a file there, or at the end of the day, or the end of the week. You don’t need to ever delete the files, unless you’re running out of space on your drive.
In this article, I’ll give you some power tips for using the Trash. I’ll tell you how to quickly delete files with keyboard shortcuts, how to recover files from the Trash, how to have your Mac automatically empty the Trash, and how to securely delete files so no one can recover them.
Read the rest of the article on The Mac Security Blog.