Home Forums Mac Software Mac Operating Systems Reboot empties trash : bad

I have noticed that reboot empties trash. This is not A Good Thing. Where is the switch/button/option to stop this happening?

Thanks.

nb: hardly ever reboot this Mac: only when system upgrade download requires it.

This gets weirder. Today the trashcan is full again, with all the original contents intact.

There are over 1,000 of them going back over a year.

Question: how to delete some of the contents but not all of them? All I can think of, is to drag out the last few months' worth, empty trash, and put those back in again.

Question(2): is it because it is so "full" that the contents did not display for some time?

I have not, personally, used Smart Trash, One Trash, or similar apps but someone else may be able to give an opinion. As to the original problem, have you checked the directory with Disk Utility or a third-party app (Diskwarrior, TechTool Pro, Drive Genius)?

AFAIK, there is no standard option in Mac OS X to empty the Trash upon reboot. It looks like you may have had a Finder issue manifested by slow updating of the Trash window. In this scenario you would have had a listing by leaving the Trash window open long enough. Such slowdowns certainly can happen, particularly (but not exclusively) on older (PPC?) Macs. Slowdowns often are accompanied by high CPU usage, something you can spot with Activity Monitor, or 3rd party utilities like iStat Menus and MenuMeters. Alternatively, Jon's suggestion about checking your HD's Directory status may help find possible problems there.

alternate got in ahead of me with the answer, but I wanted to add that with the help of MacPilot I was able to locate a Terminal command that prohibits emptying trash…


…but nothing that would cause the trash to empty automatically. I also found an app in the App Store called Trash Sort that looks as if it might solve your problem of selectively clearing out the trash folder. I haven't tried it and it is currently unrated in the app store but it might be worth a look.

Forgive the question if it seems too obvious, but is the Mac in question connected to a local network? Are there other mounted volumes accessible to you in addition to the boot volume? I ask because the Trash you see on your Desktop merges the trash folders from all mounted volumes on which you have write priveleges—so if there are items in the Trash on an auxiliary volume that's not always mounted, they would seem to come and go.

Not on a technical note, but on a computer usage note: are you using the trash can as a filing system of some sort?