From the course: Computer Literacy for Mac (2018)

Taking out the trash - Mac OS Tutorial

From the course: Computer Literacy for Mac (2018)

Taking out the trash

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- [Instructor] During the course of your day to day managing of the files and folders on your Mac, you'll most likely come across items that you no longer need. If you really don't need a copy of a file anymore, you should move it to your Mac's Trash which is represented by the little wastebasket icon on the far right side of the dock. On my desktop, I have the to-do list file that I previously created and let's say I don't need it anymore. All I have to do to get rid of it is drag it to the Trash. So I click, I keep hold of my mouse button as I move my mouse down to the Trash and I release. I hear a little sound effect and notice the Trash's icon has changed to look like paper has been thrown in the wastebasket which is a nice visual indication that there are items in your Trash. Now, just like with the real trashcan that sits by your feet at your desk, you can still retrieve files that you've thrown into the trash as long as you haven't emptied the trash which we'll look at how to do in just a moment. To see the contents of the Trash, just click it. So you can see my to-do list is still sitting here safe and sound. If I change my mind and I want to remove it from the Trash, all I have to do is drag it back to my desktop. Let's put that back in the Trash for a moment. I can either drag it to the open Trash window or back to the Trash icon and it goes right back in. A nice feature of Mac OS is that you select a file in your Trash by clicking it once and then clicking this gear button up here and one of the options here is Put Back which when chosen, puts the selected file back to where it was before you moved it to the Trash. You can see in this case it just added it back to my desktop and even opened up the Desktop folder so I can see where it went. This can be especially useful if you change your mind about trashing a file that was previously stored in several nested folders. Instead of having to navigate through all of those folders, you can just choose Put Back to return it to its original location and again, in this case, it returned the file to the desktop. Just go ahead and close these windows again. What if you really do want to completely get rid of a file? Well, first, we just drag it to the Trash then we can choose Finder, Empty Trash and a message appears asking you to confirm that you do want to empty the Trash and it warns that you can't undo this if you proceed. This is your last chance to change your mind. If you're sure you want to empty the Trash, click Empty Trash. We hear that little sound effect and notice my Trash icon goes back to the appearance of an empty wastebasket and there's no longer anything in the Trash window. So that to-do list really has been deleted from my computer. Now, there are ways to potentially rescue recently deleted files involving special software and other techniques but we're not going to get into that here and there are also other ways to send files to the Trash and empty it but now you have the basic knowledge needed to understand how the trash system works on your Mac and how to trash and delete files when you no longer need them.

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