Empty the Trash on an External Drive (.Trashes) on Mac

You deleted 40 GB of old files from an external drive, but its free space didn't budge. That's normal: the files weren't actually deleted. Finder moved them into a hidden .Trashes folder at the root of that drive, where they sit until you empty the Trash — on the same Mac, with the drive still plugged in.

Why the space isn't freed

Every volume gets its own trash. When you delete a file from an external drive, macOS doesn't copy it to your Mac's Trash — it moves it sideways into .Trashes on the drive itself, into a subfolder named after your user ID. The Trash icon in your Dock is a unified view of all of these per-volume trashes, so the files look like they left the drive. They didn't. The space only comes back when the Trash is emptied while that drive is mounted.

Eject the drive before emptying and the deal is off: those items silently drop out of the Trash window, and the deleted files ride along on the drive until the next time it's connected.

Free the space the normal way

1. Connect the external drive and wait for it to mount.
2. Choose Finder → Empty Trash, or Control-click the Trash icon in the Dock and choose Empty Trash.
3. Select the drive in Finder and press Cmd+I — the Available figure in Get Info should now show the reclaimed space.

If emptying fails with a "file in use" error, quit the app holding the file and try again — our guide on forcing the Trash to empty walks through the stubborn cases.

See the hidden folder for yourself

.Trashes is invisible in Finder by default. Press Cmd+Shift+. in a Finder window to reveal hidden files (press it again to hide them — the shortcut is its own undo). Or measure it from Terminal:

# How much is the drive's hidden trash holding? (read-only; replace "YourDrive")
sudo du -sh /Volumes/YourDrive/.Trashes

A multi-gigabyte result here is exactly the "missing" space you've been looking for.

If you'd rather never play this game with a particular drive, skip the trash entirely: select the files and press Option+Cmd+Delete (or hold Option and choose File → Delete Immediately…). Finder asks for confirmation once, then removes the files on the spot — no .Trashes, no second step, and no safety net either.

Trash left behind by other computers

A drive that's been used on several machines can carry trash your Mac can't see. Inside .Trashes there's one folder per user ID, and your Trash only shows your own; deletions made on a friend's Mac stay invisible. Drives shared with Windows collect a $RECYCLE.BIN folder too. The clean fix is to empty the trash on the computer that did the deleting. When that's not possible, there's the careful last resort:

# LAST RESORT — permanently deletes everything in the drive's trash.
# Triple-check the volume name before pressing Return; there is no undo.
sudo rm -rf /Volumes/YourDrive/.Trashes

Removing the folder itself is harmless — macOS recreates .Trashes automatically the next time you delete something from that drive. The danger is a typo: get the path wrong and rm -rf will cheerfully delete whatever you pointed it at instead.

Still missing space after emptying?

If the Trash is empty and the drive's free space still looks wrong, you're likely looking at a different mechanism — APFS snapshots or purgeable storage. See why deleted files don't always free space on a Mac.