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Empty the Trash on Mac OS X Yosemite

Edited by Grimm, Amanda, Eng

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Steps

Video: Empty the Trash on Mac OS X Yosemite

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You're watching VisiHow. In this tutorial, we are going to show you how to empty the Trash from your Mac when running OS X Yosemite.

Empty the trash on Mac OS X Yosemite.mp4-canvas98 290667.jpg

Steps

1
First, open the Trash option
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It should be on the dock. Move the mouse pointer down to the bottom of the screen, and the dock will appear. On the far right side of the dock, there is a trash bin. In our case, we can even see little bits of trash in it. It's labeled "Trash". This is the option where all of the Trash for our system is stored. To open it, simply give it a click. This opens a finder window displaying all of our Trash.

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2
Review the Trash
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In our case, we have four items. They are all shortcuts. Make sure that everything in the Trash should be deleted, not restored. Let's look at three ways to delete the Trash.

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3
Empty the Trash by clicking on the "Empty" button in the upper-right side
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This button will get rid of all of the Trash.
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4
Alternatively, right-click or option-click a single item
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An option-click is accomplished on the Mac by holding the option button and clicking the mouse, or using two fingers while clicking the icon. Note that when we click with two fingers, hold, and then release our fingers, the menu goes away. To avoid this, click quickly. Clicking and holding will cause the menu to disappear on release. In the menu that appears, we have the option to "Open", "Put Back", or "Empty Trash".

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5
Click the desired option
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In our case, we will click "Empty Trash".
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6
Click "Empty Trash" to confirm or "Cancel" to cancel
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A confirmation window asks, "Are you sure you want to permanently erase the items in the Trash?" It warns us, "You can't undo this action." For this demonstration, we will click "Cancel". Let's look at another way to empty the Trash on the Mac.

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7
Move the mouse cursor to the top left of the finder window, and find the red circle with the black "x"
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Click one time to close it.
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8
Navigate back down to the bottom of the screen to bring up the dock
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On the right side, we see the Trash option.

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9
Hold the option button and click the mouse one time, or give a simple, quick two-finger tap
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Now we have the option to "Open" or "Empty Trash".
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10
Click "Empty Trash"
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This will once again give us the window asking if we would like to permanently erase the items in the Trash. This is not something that can be undone, so if we delete an important file, or we delete something that we didn't want to delete, we will need to use alternative methods to restore the file, as Mac OS X Yosemite will not support that action. Since we don't need those shortcuts, we are going to go ahead and click "Empty Trash". A single click or a single tap on the touch pad will empty the Trash. We'll hear a crumpling sound of paper, and the Trash will be emptied.
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11
Move the mouse back down to the doc and look at the Trash bin icon
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We will see that we now have a clean, empty trash can.
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12
This concludes our tutorial on emptying the Trash from your Mac using OS X Yosemite
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If you have additional questions, comments or suggestions, please let us know in the section below.
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