10 Things To Know About Using the Trash On Your Mac

The normal way to delete files on your Mac is to use the Trash or Bin folder. There are several shortcuts and advanced techniques that you should know about.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are some tips for using the Trash on your Mac. 
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So the trash, or the Bin as it is called in many countries, is the primary tool you use on your Mac to delete files. It's part of a two-step process. If you want to delete a file you first move it into the Trash and then you empty the Trash. This is meant to be a safety net so you don't accidentally delete something because it's too easy to delete a file. So before I even talk about tips I want to caution you about using the trash incorrectly. A lot of people will put files in the Trash even if they are not sure they want to delete them. The idea being that they can look in the Trash, review those files first and then empty the Trash. But you should never do this! Think of it just like a trash can at your house. Not one inside your house but the one outside that's collected. Sure if you put something in there there is a little bit of time for you to, maybe, recover it if you made a mistake. But you would never put anything in that trashcan unless you were absolutely sure you wanted to get rid of it forever. The same is true with your Trash or Bin on your Mac. If you have files that you want to move into a place where you can review them to see if you want to delete them create a folder for that. Put them in there and then move them to the Trash or Bin only when you're sure you want to delete them. Don't use the Trash itself as part of a review process.
Okay. So let's get to the tips. First, you don't have to drag an drop something to the trash like that. A much better way, that most people use today, would be to select a file or several files using Command or Shift and then you can go to File and then Move to Trash. But you still wouldn't even use that. You would use Command Delete. This would move the files to the Trash the same way as dragging it. It is just a lot easier.
Now there are several different ways to do the next step and empty the trash. One is to go to the trash, I'm just going to double-click on it here, but you can also Control Click and choose Open, and then you're looking at your Trash folder. There's an Empty Button here at the top right. You click that to empty the Trash. But without even opening up the Trash folder you can also go to the Finder and then Empty Trash. This will prompt you to ask if you're sure you want to do it. But you can skip the prompt by holding the Option Key down and you can see the three dots go away. There's a keyboard shortcut for this. It will empty the Trash without the prompt.
Now if you decide you want to throw away a file in one step you can do it. So you would select the file that you want to delete. Then if you go to File and then Move To Trash notice that if you hold the Option Key down that changes to Delete Immediately. The keyboard shortcut is simply Option Command Delete. This will skip the trash and delete that file or all the files you have selected.
When you put a file or files in the Trash, I'll move these three items to the Trash with Command Delete. If you made a mistake the quickest way to recover is not to use any special functionality. Just Undo. The Undo function works on moving files from one location to the other and it works on moving files to the Trash. If you go to Edit and then Undo it says Undo Move of Three Items. Because that's all you've really done here is moved those items to the Trash. So I'll just use Command Z and those files are returned to where they were. This, of course, only works if that was the very last thing that you did. If you move somethings to the Trash, say yesterday, you're not going to be able to use Undo to get them back.
However, you can put files back from the Trash very easily using another function. I'm going to use Command Delete to remove those files and put them in the Trash. If I look in the Trash here I can see what's there. I can select a file and then I can go to File and notice that Command Delete is now Put Back. It's the opposite. If I use Put Back it actually returns that file to the location and even opens the folder to show it to me. You can do that with a selection of files as well. I can do File, and Put Back, and all of those go back. This will even work if the items are from different locations. So, for instance, I'll select a file from this location here. Command Delete to move it to the Trash and this location here Command Delete to move it to the Trash. If I were to select both of these files here and then choose Put Back it will put each one of them back to its original place. You could see they are both back in those folders.
Now let's say I do have a bunch of things in the Trash here and I want to Empty the trash. But I want to kind of do a few of these first. Maybe there's a huge file in these and I just want to get rid of that right away. Well, with any file here you can select it and then you still have the option to go to File and with Put Back hold the Option Key down and it changes to Delete Immediately. You can also Control Click here and then Delete Immediately and that will get rid of that one file while not getting rid of any of the rest right now. You can also see in this Context Menu other items here that are useful like Empty Trash and Put Back for that file that's selected.
Now when you're using the Trash itself you can use any Finder View. Using the List View is particularly useful because it gives you lots of information. But if you Control Click on the column headings here and you add the Date Added column you get a list here and it shows you the day and time that each item was added to the Trash. So if you go into the Trash to find a file and you don't know its name but you know when you added it to the Trash you can use this Date Added column. You can sort in either direction and try to find the item by the time it was added.
I know a problem a lot of us have with the Trash is we put things in there and then forget to ever empty the trash. Well, you can fix this by sending your Mac to automatically delete items from the trash whenever they have been in the trash for 30 day or longer. To turn this On go into System Settings and then go to General. Then Storage. Then look for Empty Trash Automatically. Turn that On and now anytime something has been in the trash for 30 days is automatically deleted. So your trash doesn't grow to be too big. You never have to worry about when you go in and empty the trash. You just put things in there and the safety net that is the trash is now a 30 day safety net.
So here's an interesting thing about the Trash. On your Mac your Trash is actually two folders, not one. These files that we have been removing here have been in iCloud Drive Documents. Well, let's go to my Home folder here and then let's look at another folder, say the Pictures folder, and I'm going to delete some files in the Pictures folder. So these aren't in iCloud Drive but in my local Home folder. So they get added to the Trash as well. I'm going to select this first file that came from iCloud Drive and do Command i to get info. You could see its location now is iCloud Drive, Trash. Or more accurately dot trash. An invisible folder that's at the top level of iCloud Drive. But what if I go to this file here that didn't come from iCloud Drive. I get Info on that you could see this one is located on my local drive under Users, My User account, and a folder called Trash. So these files, even though they are both shown here in the Trash folder, are actually in two different locations. So the Trash folder is actually showing you a combined view of your iCloud Drive trash and your local drive trash. Note that files like this one, that are on iCloud Drive trash, can also be seen in the Files App on iOS and iPad OS devices. But there it is not called Trash in the Files App. It is called Recently Deleted. But, of course, you wouldn't see the files that are local to your Mac. They don't exist in iCloud. So you won't see them on your iPhone or iPad, of course.
Now one last thing to know about Trash. Sometimes when you add a file to the Trash, say a big file that you want to delete to clear out space, and then you empty the Trash you may notice that you don't get any space back on your drive. Well, you always will get the space back. But sometimes you won't get it back immediately. Usually this has to do with the backup process. A file may have been flagged for a future Time Machine Backup and when you delete that file it doesn't get rid of it completely because it still has to complete that backup. You can usually speedup this process by doing a Time Machine Backup right there and then. If you're using a MacBook that you only sometimes plug into your Time Machine Drive, plug it in then and do the backup. That should either clear out the space after the backup is done or within the next 24 hours. So when you empty the Trash and notice you don't get all your space back that's by design. It's to make sure that your backups are complete, as they should be, so deleting a file doesn't actually retroactively pull that file out from your backup because the backup hasn't been updated yet.
Hope you found all these tips useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 17 Responses to “10 Things To Know About Using the Trash On Your Mac”

Bent

1 year ago

I have often wondered how the Mac managed the trash for my iCloud files and my no-iCloud files. Thanks. Now I understand and have a good feeling.

Paul D. Womer

Good advice re not using Trash as a "hold" file. Aside from that, when I entered System Settings/Genera/Storage, the window was different as your video. There was no option for recommendations as you displayed. Can you explain the difference? P

Gary Rosenzweig

Paul: I think the recommendations vary depending on what your Mac thinks you'll need. You can check in Finder, Settings, Advanced for another place to check "Delete After 30 Days."

Robert Dettman

Hi Gary, my System Settings > General > Storage doesn't show the option for trash ???

Robert: That section is "Recommendations" so maybe you have it turned on already? Check in Finder, Settings, Advanced.

David Wright

Hi Gary, just to clarify if I delete files from Trash (say after 30 days) does this also delete the trashed files held on iCloud

David: Should. Why not try it with a sample file right now and see.

nick

Gary, if I have a file stored in a folder for a long time (weeks, months), then move it to the trash and empty the trash, would that file still be in Time Machine backups? thx

nick: Yes, you would find it by going to that folder and looking back in time before you moved it to the Trash. Doing exactly that is one of the primary features of using Time Machine.

Frank Scully

I noticed that the space becomes available only after 1) the bin is emptied 2) the APFS snapshots have been cleared out

Frank; Exactly.

Jonathan

What about the trash in the Mail app with or without iCloud mail engaged? Is that a completely different beast?

Jonathan: Completely different. Email mailboxes (folders) are stored with your email provider (iCloud, Gmail, Yahoo, etc). This would include the Trash folder and how it is handled.

Chethan Belludi

Hi Gary, when I select a file and go to "File" in the menu bar, I see Move to Trash function; this can be turned into Delete Immediately by holding the Option key. However, when I right-click on a file (or a set of files), the context menu also has this Move to Trash function; but this cannot be modified by holding the Option key. Am I doing something wrong?

Chethan: No, that's just how it works.

Antanas

Hi Gary, if I want to create a shortcut and delete using simply the delete/back key, without command, how can I do it?

Antanas: You really can't. And shouldn't. That would make it too easy to delete files and would eventually mean you may accidentally delete something.

Comments Closed.

10 Things To Know About Using the Trash On Your Mac

Comments: 17 Responses to “10 Things To Know About Using the Trash On Your Mac”

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