The first thing you can do is to make sure you are not securely deleting your trash. This is an option in OS X that will completely overwrite the data that was stored where those deleted files were. Basically, it makes sure that no data can be recovered once it has been deleted. Most people would not want this unless they are storing super sensitive information that they would not want anyone to be able to see even after the data has been deleted.
Go to Finder, then click on Preferences and then click on Advanced.
Make sure Empty Trash Securely is not checked. If you had that checked for any reason, it would take a lot longer to empty the trash. If this option wasn’t checked and emptying the trash is still slow, you can empty the trash using Terminal.
Open Terminal by going to Applications, Utilities and Terminal and type in the following command:
rm -rf ~/.Trash/*Make sure you type it exactly as it appears above with no extra spaces or anything else. Using this command incorrectly can lead to deletion of files and folders you did not intend to delete.
Emptying the trash using the Terrminal is significantly faster than the traditional method of using the GUI. Most of the time it’s probably not worth going into the Terminal, but if you have a huge amount of data that you just deleted, it might be worth the extra effort to save some time. Note that using this command in the terminal does not delete the trash that is from external hard drives or other partitions, just the local files on your Mac.
That’s it! If you are having issues/problems with emptying the trash in OS X Lion or other thoughts, please post a comment here and let us know! Enjoy!
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