The power of "Secure Trash" in OS X 10.6

Once you delete the item (files/ folder) it is moved to Trash bin. Now if you want to delete those items permanently, you can click Secure Trash in the latest version of Mac i.e. Snow Leopard. In the earlier versions of Mac OS X, this feature was termed as Empty Trash. Its the same process that you do by when you select Empty Recycle Bin on a Windows Operating System.

The purpose of this post is to focus on how safe your data is, once you delete is permanently from your machine. As we all are aware of the data recovery methods available in the world of IT today where you can use third party utilities and recover the data even after it is deleted from the machine. Taking this into consideration, the security of your deleted data is too low which might cause loss of business or integrity.
In order to tackle this, Apple has added a feature of 7-Pass Erase using which you can securely delete the data from the machine. In this process, it writes random data on the hard drive and deletes it which reduces the chance of data being recovered to almost null. This feature is so strong that it meets the standard of US Department of Defense.

So next time when you are Securing your Trash bin, you can be assured of the data being wiped out and will not be recovered using the utilities available in the market.