How to fix the most irritating Finder fault on the Apple Mac

It is not exactly a fault and some might call it a feature, but it's still very irritating and if you use USB thumb drives (flash drives) you will have discovered it. They run out of space.

Here is the problem. You add files to the thumb drive and when they are no longer needed, they are deleted. However, files are not really deleted and they are simply moved to a hidden Trash folder on the thumb drive.

If you delete a file on a thumb drive and then open the Trash on the Mac, the deleted files can be seen. However, their true location is on the thumb drive and not on the Mac.

Even if you delete all the files on the thumb drive, sooner or later it will be full and no more files can be copied to it. It is those pesky deleted files in the hidden Trash on the thumb drive.

The problem exists on any external drive and it is not limited to thumb drives. However, if you have a 1TB external USB drive you are not going to be worried about a few gigabytes of lost space.

Files are not really deleted, just hidden

The limited space on a thumb drive makes the problem much worse and the smaller it is, the worse it gets.

All files deleted, yet 971.5MB is used on the drive!

Empty the Trash

The obvious thing to do of course, is to empty the Trash. However, this empties all Trash everywhere and there is no option to empty just the Trash on the thumb drive.

You may not want to delete all Trash because then you won't be able to recover files deleted on the Mac's disk that you later discover are actually need. Emptying the Trash is therefore not an attractive option.

Delete files immediately

If one or more files or folders are selected, they can be deleted without moving them to the Trash. Click File, hold down the Option key and Move to Trash becomes Delete Immediately. Click it. The Trash is bypassed and the files are really deleted, which means that all the space they were using is recovered.

The downside of this is that you cannot recover the deleted files, so if you make a mistake or later discover you need one of the files then it is tough luck.

Another disadvantage is that you may forget to Delete Immediately and simply send files to the Trash. Once there, you can't get rid of them without emptying the whole Trash everywhere.

Apps you use may delete files by moving them to the Trash and they might not have an option to really delete them by bypassing the Trash.

Curb the Trash

Curb is a free utility that can empty the Trash on external removeable drives. Go and get Curb (https://mrrsoftware.com/curb/), unzip it and drag the app to the Applications folder. The app does not appear to have been updated in years, but it works fine on macOS High Sierra on my Mac.

Using the app could not be simpler. It opens a window on the desktop when it is run and all you have to do is drag the drive icon to the window and drop it.

(If you don't have removeable drive icons on the desktop, go to Finder, Preferences, General and tick all the boxes.)

If you check the free space on the drive before and after, you can see how much the free space has increased thanks to emptying the Trash. And if you look at the Trash on your Mac, all the deleted files are still there and only the ones on the thumb drive are gone.