Automatically Empty Trash

A small but useful new feature in macOS Sierra will automatically delete items in your Trash that have been there for more than 30 days. This could be useful for most Mac users, especially if you often run out of drive space. It can also help those who maintain Macs for others.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: If you're like most Mac users, you're Trash gets filled up with all sorts of files, usually a lot more then this, and then it just keeps building up and building up. The next thing you know you're out of drive space and you notice that you've got a ton of stuff in Trash.
So you go and empty the trash.
But wouldn't it be nice if it did that for you automatically? After all Trash is supposed to be a temporary holding place to prevent you from making a mistake like deleting a file but a minute later realizing that you didn't want to delete it.
There is an option in Sierra. It's a new option. You can find it under Finder, Preferences. You can actually find it in a couple of places but this is one.
Finder, Preferences, Advanced. It's got an option for Remove Items from Trash after Thirty Days. So you turn this on and anything that's older than thirty days is automatically going to get deleted. So your trash will kind of empty itself.
This is useful for most Mac users to keep drive space available. But it's very useful if you help somebody maintain a Mac. Somebody that's not computer savvy and you're always helping them with questions and making sure their Mac is running smoothly. You might find that very often they run out of drive space and you have to walk them through emptying their trash. You can see right there it just emptied all the old stuff out automatically because I turned that on.
Anyway if you turn this on for them then it might be one less thing to worry about maintaining for them. They may end up calling you less because they run out of drive space a lot less often with their Trash automatically getting rid of files older than thirty days.

Automatically Empty Trash

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information