So here's something that seems pretty straight forward until you start to think about it.
Say you put a file in the trash.
I'm going to drag a file here and I can dump it in the trash.
Looks like it's gone.
Says this folder has zero items in it.
But I know that it's still there in the trash.
I can click on the trash and there it is.
I can drag it back or somewhere else.
I can even Control click on it and I could say Put Back.
That all makes sense.
But what happens if this is an external drive or a removable drive.
In this case it's a thumb drive.
A USB thumb drive.
I'm going to drag this to the trash.
What happens if I eject the thumb drive.
If I look in the trash now with the thumb drive in there, there is the file in the trash
and any other files that I would have thrown away on my main hard drive would be in here
as well.
But if I eject the thumb drive you can see it goes away.
It's not there anymore.
That's because the file is still on that external drive.
Putting it in the trash doesn't move it to some trash folder on your local drive.
It's in a special location on that external drive.
So what you see as the trash is actually a list of files that are on any connected drives
that you have thrown in the trash.
So if you have, say, an external drive, an internal drive, and maybe a USB thumb drive
and you have items in the trash from all three of them you're going to see them in a big
list here.
But you'll only see the items for the drives that are connected.
So disconnect one of those drives and those items disappear.
Now if I reattach that drive it will reappear in the trash because now it's connected to
that drive and there it goes.
There's that item that's reappear there in the trash.
Now here's something else that's interesting.
There's actually more than this one item in the trash on this external drive.
Where is it because we only see one.
Well I used this external drive on another Mac and I threw items from that Mac in the
trash.
When I did that it put it in the trash from the drive but it doesn't give permission for
other users and other computers to see those items.
In order to see those trash items I need to put it back.
So, if I were to eject the drive now, stick it in another Mac you would not see this file
anywhere.
It wouldn't appear in the trash.
There would be no way to recover it on that Mac.
You have to put it back in the same user and on the same Mac in order to recover that file
out of the trash.
This is great for security.
If you throw something away in the trash and then you give that drive to somebody else
they can't get what's out of the trash and view it.
You should empty the trash to make sure that that file is gone but at least you know if
you make a mistake that file won't be accessible by anybody else.
One more thing I want to show you about the Trash.
Suppose I drag these three items from my local hard drive into the trash.
Now I know I've got this one item here and it's from that thumb drive.
I can actually get information, Command I, and it will say where, thumb drive, right
there.
Whereas if I select this item here then when I get information on that it says where, and
my local iCloud Drive.
So I can tell where these items come from.
Now suppose I want to empty trash but for some reason I don't want to delete these just
yet.
I only want to delete the one on this USB drive so I can give it to somebody.
Well, you can actually do that.
If you Control click on it there is the option to Delete immediately and that will delete
that one file immediately and leave the rest of your trash untouched.
It's a handy way just to clear up just those items that are on that drive or just a particular
item you really want to delete while leaving the rest of your trash intact.