When you delete files on a Mac, you basically send them to Trash. It is a special folder on Macs that contains all deleted files. Instead of deleting the files directly, they are first moved to the Trash so that we can undo our steps in the event of deleting files by mistake. Only after emptying the Trash, we finally delete those files.
Usually, we have to manually empty the Trash if we want to get rid of all the deleted files. For emptying the Trash, we can pull-down the Apple menu and then choose to empty the Trash from there. But we can also set Mac to automatically empty Trash every 30 days. Here is how:
- From the Finder menubar on the top of your screen, select Finder and then Preferences.
- In the Finder Preferences window, select the Advanced tab if it is not already selected.
- Select the checkbox labeled Remove items from the Trash after 30 days.
- This is it, you have set Mac to empty the Trash automatically.
After you have finished these steps, your Mac will automatically empty Trash and remove the files that were deleted more than 30 days ago. It will still keep the newer deleted files in the Trash. This feature can be disabled in the same manner.
If your storage drive is running out of the storage space, then Mac will also notify you and recommend enabling this feature. Keeping this option enabled ensures that you do not keep deleted files in the Trash for a very long time. Having multiple gigabytes of deleted files in the Trash is not productive, is basically useless and can also make your Mac a tad slow.
Along with emptying the Trash, we can also scan our Mac for garbage or junk files using a software like CCleaner for Mac so that we can recover more storage space.