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As I set up a second Mac in as many days, I found myself getting irritated with OS X’s default “Are you sure you want to permanently erase the items in the Trash?” warning. Aside from the semantic issue that emptying the trash doesn’t actually delete the items — it just removes reference to them from the hard drive’s directory, leaving them there to be discovered until over written by something else — I just get tired of clicking that button again and again.

Furthermore, as a 45-year-old that’s never been to a class reunion, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what’s already in the past let alone regretting it. So, I prefer to configure my Macs to securely the empty trash every time I press Command + Shift + Delete.

Set it and forget it

So, get to the Finder (a.k.a. Desktop) and select Preferences from the Finder menu (Command + comma). And, as shown above, uncheck “Show warning…” and, if you’re feeling particularly daring and wanna live regret free, check “Empty Trash securely.”

However, the corollary to emptying the trash securely by default is having an automatic backup strategy in place and running it daily. That said, I don’t and my wife thinks me quite the fool, though you might not be so lucky as I in that regard…

What’s your take?

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