Emptying trash takes hours!!!

i have a brand-new 17" macbook pro. i'm moving all my data from an imac & in the process have had much cause to empty the trash. but more than half the time, when i empty the trash it says it's preparing to delete over one thousand items, and it takes hours! other times it behaves normally.
i worry that something must be wrong... does anybody else have this problem & if so is there anything to be done? should i be frightened?

"i have a brand-new 17" macbook pro."
Then take advantage of the 90 days of FREE phone tech support from Apple before it runs out (unless you have purchased AppleCare).
!http://i50.tinypic.com/izvwo1.gif!

Similar Messages

Emptying Trash takes ages ... :(

Hello,
I find recently that emptying my system trash takes a really long time ... Before, it used to be very quick with a noise of scrumpling up paper, now it just hangs and countsdown the item to be deleted super slow. I just upgraded to Lion but before was having the same issue with Snow Leopard.
I have installed Trashit - which works fine - but I don't see why I should have to use a 3rd party app to sort out my problem and I would prefer to just drag to the icon as I'm meant to.
Any ideas?
Thank you -
M

Thanks for your response, AnaMusic - much appreciated I shouldn't have been so quick off the mark to post - I found the response here about 4 seconds later with exactly the same title and tags... doh !

Why does SECURE EMPTY TRASH take so long (several days)?

I am using OS 10.3.9. I didn't empty the trash for quite a while, and several days ago clicked SECURE EMPTY TRASH. The emptying process began but has not finished even now! Does it take THAT much longer when one uses SECURE EMPTY TRASH? I see that the little message window for Trash says:
Item to delete: 114,158 This number hasn't gone down now for several minutes.
Several times I have stopped the Empty Trash process to shut the computer down or just because I wanted to stop it, but it seem to me that after "Emptying the Trash" has been going on for so long, it ought to be finished by now. I welcome any sunlight you can shed on this. Thank you.
— Lorna in Southern California

When you choose to Secure Empty Trash, the system
must overwrite the area where those items area a
minimum of 7 times for it to be considered secure.
When you have that many files in the Trash, this can
take quite some time.
So, unless you have something that is confidential in
the Trash, your best option is to Empty Trash
normally.
Mulder
If my answer helped solve your problem, please
consider awarding some points. Why
Reward Points?
OK, and thank you. You have answered my question; I now won't be worrying that something is awfy. The Secure Empty Trash is still emptying and it is down to about 77,000 items. I have clicked the YES, MY QUESTION HAS BEEN ANSWERED button and I appreciate your reassurance.
— Lorna in Southern California

Secure Empty Trash - takes forever with SSD

I've installed 2 x 256 GB Samsung SSDs that I am now thinking of using as my bootdrive. But as I was playing around with them, I noticed that they turn into the slowest turtles when secure emptying the trash. Having done some investigating, one issue appears to be OS X's habit of zeroing the respective areas 7 times to meet the DoD standards. (I believe that is not the only issue though as secure emptying also takes much longer in my RAID 0 HD setup than it should for just writing that amount of data 7 times).
I couldn't find any clues on how to change this behaviour of overwriting 7 times. As a recent study suggests that most data is gone for good after a single overwrite on both, HDs and SSDs, I reckon that is good enough for me. Any ideas on how to change that behaviour? (I am aware of the regular emptying trash, what I want is a 'secure empty' with a single overwrite).

Thank you - that's very helpful.
I guess this response also implies there is no way to change the default behaviour of the GUI?

Emptying trash takes forever

When I empty the trash in Lion it takes forever. There are 15000 -20000 files in the trash. They look to be coming from the Time Machine backups. Everytime I clean them out they come back. Any ideas?
Rex

I am right clicking on the trash icon and selecting "Empty Trash". I think I was able to find the issue. I deleted my backups on my airport and recreated them. Once I did that it resolved the issue.

Empty trash takes a long time!!

I've got a 18.86GB trash and I can't empty it!!!
I left it there for a long while and It still doesn't empty!!
Is there any way to force empty the trash without damaging my system/Hard-drive? (I tried Secure empty trash... Same result)
I downloaded Force Empty Trash from Macmaps.com, will it damage my system/Hard-drive?
looking for answers from a master!!!

I do hope that you haven't put sleepimage there !!
The trash is actually a directory (.Trash) in your home directory.
Open Terminal and enter:
$ cd .Trash
$ ls -lase (This will then list the contents of Trash).
You can then delete files directly from Trash using:
$ rm <filename>
For more information on the usage of "rm", type:
$ man rm
Note that this command is very powerful and should not be used in the wrong place, or with the wrong wildcards!
Cheers,
Rodney

Emptying trash takes long

I mean forever. I once wanted to remove one backup from the Time Machine drive, but when it counted about 800 000 files to be removed and started counting them down very slowly (I have a fast drive), I force killed the Locum process responsible for trash emptying and removed the files from the terminal (rm -rf). Of course it took much less time. Then I wanted to empty the rest of the trash, but this takes very long ever since. It always has say 10 files to remove and keeps removing them one after one for about a minute (insanely slow). Today I wanted to erase about 400 files (about 8GB) from my class 6 SD card and it took about two hours till I lost my patience, stopped the emptying (clicking the stop button now) and formatted the card in my camera. I wonder if it is the rm-rf procedure Mac Leopard doesn't like or what? If you look at my specs you will notice a good CPU and a fast disk too, that's just insane, It has never happened before till I did rm -rf the first time. And of course the Locum process takes a LOT of CPU performance while erasing the files. please give a suggestion what to do. thanks

1) it didn't take forever with rm -rf which is good to know in some cases
2) now everything takes forever. Okay not forever but for example I just removed a small app and trash emptying took loooong again, about a minute instead of a split of second, it has never happened to me before on a slower mac, I guess something is wrong. the Locum process - whatever it means - ate up about 130% of CPU (a whole core + 30% of the other one). I will try to reboot and inform.
edit: ah i looked the word up, no i'm not talking about a locum tenens, it is the actual name of the process which cares for file moving and trash emptying. FYI /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/DesktopServicesPriv.framework/Resources/Locum
ohhhh you should see it counting down one after one, I tried to remove VLC player (mine 128MB), it the trash emptying window shows over 1200 files to be removed and counting down slowly at about 3files/second rate. weird. rebooting now.
Message was edited by: cukerko

Does secure empty trash save disk space?

Secure empty trash takes so much longer than just emptying the trash. Is secure empty trash just used to prevent files from being recovered, or does it actually save disk space on the iMac?

I am aware that everyone said that it doesn't save any disk space, because I read through the thread.
HOWEVER.
I had gotten down to 500 mb of disk space and was going crazy trying to delete photos and movies.
Finally I read about the secure delete, tried it. It took 24 hours, and then i hat 36 free gigabites.
THIRTY SIX GIGS OF MEMORY THAT I DIDNT HAVE BEFORE.
Only thing is I have no idea why, because everyone else says that it doesnt clear space.

How 'EMPTY TRASH'? I know the 'keybord shortcut'. Isn't there a E-Z pulldown way?

HOW EMPTY TRASH?
I would just like to know an easy way to pull down something from the screen top and empty my trash.
I only know 2 ways to EMPTY TRASH in Snow Leopard:
1) I know the KEYBOARD SHORTCUT for EMPTY TRASH.
& I know how to do it this way:
2) OPEN TRASH BASKET. Then go to top of screen to PULL down APPLE's 'HELP' & TYPE 'EMPTY TRASH' : then click on "EMPTY TRASH" when it appears as the answer (It won't give me the darn answer! it just does it when i click for it to give me the answer!). This empties the trash.
& PS: WHAT is the other selection in Apple 'HELP' when i type 'Empty Trash' it also offers this: 'SECURE EMPTY TRASH"?
I even went to 'Mac Basics' but apparently my question is just to basic for them to show an obvious answer.
Thanks.

thelnukus wrote:
What is the difference between 'Empty Trash' and 'Secure Empty Trash' ??
For "Secure Empty Trash" read: OS X Mountain Lion: Prevent deleted files from being read
"When you delete files, the disk space that the files occupied is available for use. However, until that section of the disk is overwritten with new data, the information from the file is still on the disk and can be retrieved by programs that read raw data.
If you want to delete files that contain sensitive information, you can place them in the Trash, and then use Secure Empty Trash to overwrite the information so it is completely removed.
Drag the items into the Trash, and then choose Finder > Secure Empty Trash.
Using Secure Empty Trash takes a bit longer than simply emptying the Trash.
If you are using disk encryption, you can set it to automatically overwrite your deleted files.
If you want to erase a hard disk and be sure no information is left, you can use one of the secure erase options in Disk Utilities. For more information on using secure erase, see Disk Utility Help."
Also: OS X Lion: Remove files and folders from your computer

Why does it take hours to empty the trash on my Mac?

My harddisks are getting full and it lasts hours to move files into the trash (I guess that this is done sequentially). So first I asked the system to empty the trash securely. And in the trash were 3 big files (.mov movies with 7GB each).
The activity monitor shows that the CPU is working full speed (2008 MacMini with Core 2 Duo Processor.
What happens? What can I do to speed up things?
Any help appreciated
Ueli

Select Apple menu > Force Quit... from the menu bar, then select Finder and press return. From the Finder menu bar, select Finder > Preferences > Advanced and uncheck the box labeled "Empty Trash securely." Try again to empty the Trash. If you still have problems, read this support article:
You can't empty the Trash or move a file to the Trash

My trash takes too long or doesn't empty at all.

I've tried the terminal option. I have trash preferences set to Secure Empty Trash everytime I empty the trash.
I updated to Mountain Lion two weeks ago, and I've been having trouble with my trash quickly emptying like it used to.
SHORT VERISON: I'm deleted shows, movies, documents, and photos (over 5,000) from my external 1TB drive. The progress bar moves slowly or not at all (I keep force quitting because it takes over three hours to delete a few files).
LONG VERSION: I have no backup of my laptop. Time Machine used to backup my laptop to this external, but it stopped deleting older version, so I had to manually delete the oldest version tonight (the only version for some reason, it doesn't show any others) to get it to try and back up, but then it said it was going to take 11 DAYS to do the backup, and I'm pretty sure I don't have enough room anyway, I even tried excluding huge files that I would be fine with losing.
So I decided to go through and delete a bunch of things on external to free up space, (and trust me, it will free up A TON of space... if they ever delete), but (and I've been experimenting) Finder can take anywhere from fifteen minutes to delete a single half hour episode, to never deleteing it at all.
I also can't move things to my laptop because I'm trying to free up space there too. I got a video camera and didn't realize that I'd downloaded over 110gigs of videos from my new camera. So I have no room on my laptop, but that won't delete it from the external anyway, it'll copy it I think.
I need to get this multitude of large and small files off my external before I can backup my laptop. But.... I can't do it! I have no idea what's wrong! It's driving me crazy. Normally some extreme form of emptying the trash worked in the past, but not now... nothing is speeding this up, or working at all.

I got to the Trash It! Link and tried that. It worked! I still don't know why Finder was acting up like that. But I'm glad to have all of this space (I also thought I would let Time Machine run for a bit while trying to figure this out, and it was up the 42 days as the estimated time).
THANK YOU! Thank you so much! I'm bookmarking that link for future reference.

Trash takes to long to empty

Since I installed Snow Leopard, emptying the trash takes forever. Does anyone know if this is normal? No matter if it's 1 file or 800. It takes sometimes hours.
Please gives us your thoughts.
Thanks

From the Finder menu bar, select Finder ▹ Preferences ▹ Advanced and uncheck the box labeled Empty Trash securely.

Emptying trash is taking hours

Hi,
I have moved lots of movies to my trash (240gb) as I wanted them on an external and it just copied them to the external so I was left with them on my laptop as well. I then tried to empty trash but it is taking literally hours and hours. Is that normal? It says 233 items to delete and seems to take an hour or so to get to 1 item less. Any ideas on how I can speed it up? thank you

I'm afraid that this is normal. We had an iPhoto Library file that was over 200 GB in size, and found that about 120 GB were due to the photos being stored as RAW files (along with their jpeg counterparts). When we deleted all the RAW files and emptied the trash, it took over 2 hours to delete these thousands of photos, thumbnails etc. totaling 120 GB. I was worried because I thought it might never end. However it did complete after about 2 hrs. This was on a Macbook Air Core2Duo (the photos were on an external drive, which might have also slowed down the process some).

Why does secure empty the trash take so long to perform?

When I empty the 'secure trash' folder, it takes hours to perform what use to take seconds or minutes to do.

Try deleting less at one time.
Unless you're trying to get rid of malware/dodgy software, there's not really much point in using 'secure empty trash' if what you're worried about is someone recovering your deleted files. Experts can still recover stuff even after that.
The only way to get rid of your data securely is to overwrite the entire disk several times with zeros (Disk Utility has a function for this, and it will take a long time.).
And if its really confidential, put the disk in an incinerator or a blender , the only 100% surefire method.

Trash - "preparing to empty trash" for 5 hours. there are 97,000 files. is this normal?

Trash - "preparing to empty trash" for 5 hours. there are 97,000 files. is this normal?

And with 97000 files it IS going to take a "while". Finder, in it's "infinite wisdom", counts the files and the deletes. It's bad enough if it's on an internal drive for that many files, but I can only imagine how long it would take with a USB or firewire external. If you are really sure you want to delete all that stuff then some choices might be,
1. Start the empty trash and go to bed! Maybe, just maybe, it will be done in the morning.
2. Use terminal to do it (won't supply the commands here, but it is a choice).
3. Try a third party utility which hopefully will empty the trash like you would from terminal. Try TrashIt.
Some related reading:
You can't empty the Trash or move a file to the Trash
The X Lab: Solving Trash Problems

Emptying trash takes hours!!!

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