Thorin Klosowski , writing for LifeHacker:
If you’ve been using OS X El Capitan for a while, you might have noticed that the old option to “Secure Empty Trash” is gone from the trash can’s right-click menu. There’s a pretty good reason why, but it’s still possible to do it you don’t mind digging into the command line.
As the name suggests, “Secure Empty Trash” was always a way to delete files securely, ensuring they can’t get dug up again by data recovery software. According to Apple, it turns out that “Secure Empty Trash” doesn’t reliably work on flash storage, like an Solid-State Drive, so Apple removed the option in El Capitan.
Interesting. If Secure Empty Trash matters to you, follow the headline link to read more. There’s a Terminal command that’ll do the trick for a spinning hard disk, and a suggestion for folks with SSDs.
[H/T John Kordyback]
Correct me if I’m wrong (I’m used to it), but isn’t this something that a company that is supposed to be so concerned about our privacy would have solved, rather than just swept under the rug?
It’s a stupid feature anyway.
Why? This was always a stop-gap feature. Full disk encryption is a better solution.
There are three types of Apple drives: old fashioned hard drives, SDD, and Fusion. You can either encrypt your drive or not. This means there are six combinations (3 types x 2 encryption types).
The secure empty trash only works with one combination. I agree with Mr Fisher. Encrypt your hard drive.
Just a little addendum about encrypting your hard drive. We did some checking in our company to debunk a myth that encrypting your hard drive had an adverse affect performance for disk I/O intensive operations.
We did a test with SSD and physical disks for a large clean/compile/assemble/test/report cycle for a Java project. 1000’s of files to read and compile, create WAR files, run unit tests, reports, etc. We found ~2-4% for SSD, ~4-6% for physical drives. More RAM or faster processors would lower the scores. This was done a Macs that were of 2011/12 vintage.
To put that in real terms – we’re talking 10-20 seconds on a 7-8 minute cycle that read, wrote, and deleted 10’s of gigs of data.
Thermally, it might be more interesting. I’ve never tested, but I imagine the encryption must have an impact. It might be minimal, though.
Exactly.
(“Secure delete” is only actually important in very rare conditions, mostly for compliance with third-party paranoia requirements around PCI or Government-mandated security.
[Oh, and of course for criminals, who should already know to encrypt and not depend on “secure delete”.]
And their requirements are often ludicrously irrational, like “write over N times”, because they think – incorrectly – that you can “recover” magnetic data unless it’s been overwritten more than once.
The Guttman paper this all stems from only applied to long-obsolete technology, and was at best marginal and hypothetical even for that.
Note that this only applies to rotary media anyway; with flash you can’t tear it apart and scan the surface, nor is the medium similar.
Real data security threats are in your OS or software or attacks to the hardware itself.)