For those Mac users who often dump items into the Trash but forget to
empty it on a regular basis, you can enable a new feature in MacOS which
allows the Trash to automatically empty itself after 30 days. This can
be a particularly nice feature if your Trash can is constantly bloated
and taking up a lot of storage space, as the files that are removed will
be removed themselves after the elapsed time period passes.
This auto-empty Trash feature requires macOS Sierra 10.12 or newer,
earlier versions of Mac OS do not have the ability to automatically
remove items from the trash can.
Remove Items from Trash Automatically After 30 Days in MacOS
- From the Finder in MacOS, go to the “Finder” menu and choose “Preferences”
- Go to the “Advanced” tab and check the box for “Remove items from the Trash after 30 days”
- Exit out of Finder preferences
Once this feature has been enabled, individual items in the Trash in
Mac OS will essentially have a 30 day timer where they are counting down
until they are automatically deleted. In other words, each file will
delete itself automatically after the 30 days pass individually, the
Trash doesn’t just empty itself once every 30 days.
You can still manually empty the trash as well.
This has no impact on the Trash aside from deleting the contents
automatically, for items and files that have yet to be delete you can
still use the Put Back feature, and you can also still use features like Delete Immediately if you don’t want to wait for the 30 days to elapse to trash an item permanently.
Keep in mind that trashing a file is irreversible, if you remove a
file you didn’t intend to delete, it will be gone for good unless you
made backups with Time Machine or otherwise.
As usual, if you decide you don’t want this feature in use, you can disable it later.
Stop Emptying Trash Automatically in MacOS
- From the Finder in MacOS, go to the “Finder” menu and choose “Preferences”
- From the “Advanced” tab, uncheck the box next to “Remove items from the Trash after 30 days”
Some users may have enabled this feature unintentionally during
initial MacOS setup or when configuring some of the various other
features on the Mac.
The feature is similar to the delete after 30 days feature of iOS Photos Recently Deleted album, where pictures are placed in a delete queue and then removed automatically once the time runs out.
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