Secure Empty Trash of Adium.app Takes Forever—Why?

ralphthemagician · Post by **ralphthemagician** » Mon May 21, 2007 1:38 pm

Strange question, but I'm curious. I've gotten into the habit of using Secure Empty Trash and whenever Adium updates itself, it throws the old version into the trash. When I empty the trash, it takes FOREVER. Like 5-10 minutes. I can't figure out why. It's really strange. I was wondering if anyone could explain it. The file isn't that big.

yelly · Post by **yelly** » Mon May 21, 2007 3:21 pm

Secure empty does tend to take quite a while, as it is overwriting the file on the HD several times. Despite this, 5-10 mins does sound like quite a bit for around 33MBs, but I doubt this has anything to do with Adium...
Have you tried this with any other files around that size and experienced similar results? How fast is you CPU?
BTW, the Adium.app file doesn't actually contain any private info of any sort (this is all in the preferences files/Xtras files/logs/keychain/whatever), so there isn't really a reason to be secure deleting it...

Post by **bgannin** » Mon May 21, 2007 7:14 pm

Secure Empty Trash operates on a per-file basis. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of individual files inside the Adium application bundle. As such, an 8 pass overwrite of them will take a considerable amount of time. A single icon does not necessarily indicate a single file (be it application or otherwise)