Koz said:
Hi Elliott,
Thanks for responding.
More clarification is needed as to the problem on this end. Ok, I
realize the document is on the desktop which is where I wanted it. The
problem is that it is also stored in with my other documents which I
can see and call up again to modify the document, but the thing is, I
do not want it stored on the computer in any way. I can't figure out
how to delete the document that is already there other than overwriting
it so that it is no longer a concern.
Hope this makes more sense.
A bit. I'll try harder.
1. If you are not using a Macintosh, stop reading now.
2. I'm not sure what you mean by "stored with my other documents"
2 (a) If you mean that you can still see it in the Office project
gallery's recent list, then open it up from there and cmd-click on the
document"s title at the top of its window. A panel will appear showing
the whole nest of folders it is buried in. It may show something like
"desktop, koz, users, macintosh HD" That means the Word thinks it is on
the desktop too. If it shows that the file is somewhere else, then it
is really a different copy of the document. Use the finder to delete it
now that you know where it is. You can't delete documents directly from
Mac Word.
After deleting the document using the Finder its entry will disappear
from Word's recent list.
2 (b) The document on your desktop might be an alias -- a tiny file
that does nothing more than remind you, and your Mac, where the real
file is. It will have a black curved upward pointing arrow in the
bottom left of its icon. If you select it in the finder and hit cmd-I
(get info), a panel will appear. It will show you where the original
file is.
3 If you have Tiger, use Spotlight to search for other documents with
similar contents. You may have forgotten an earlier draft with another
name. Warning: Word docs of more than 100 or so pages are not fully
indexed by Spotlight.
WARNING:
Now I'm launching into one of my famous barely on topic rants. It is
not intended to be directed at you Koz.
4. If you *really* want no trace of the document, not even from the
cops after they have impounded your computer, then after you have
trashed the doc, and before doing a normal empty trash, do a secure
empty trash from the Finder's finder menu. That not only removes the
file from every directory tree, it scribbles over the bit of the disk
the doc once lived on several times, making it *much* harder to recover
it.
If you want to keep it safe-ish from the NSA as well, it might be a
good idea to reboot twice, the second boot from another device and
securely overwrite free space on all your disks with Disk Utility.
Allow a *lot* of time -several days - if you have big disks. (Just in
case some smartypants wants to know why reboot twice -- the first one
deleted your swap files in /var/vm which have a very good chance of
holding some copy of work once in progress, and yes, you can run with
encrypted swap files, but most people don't)
4 (b) Unless your backups are securely encrypted, and you are pretty
resistant to rubber hose cryptanalysis, stick the DVDs through a
shredder. OK, I'm getting silly here, but I'm pointing out the limits
of "deletion". It is amazingly difficult to completely erase every
trace of a crime^h^h^h file. I recently completed a long running and
fairly political project. It took days to shred all the muck I had
collected, and I'm only now at the stage where I'm mildly confident
that not much will turn up by accident. I'm not proof against
decryption key passphrases being beaten out of me. And I have no idea
which of my coworkers has copies of stuff I wish I hadn't written. With
hindsight, I would have planned for far greater emphasis on the whole
security question. We all ran with PGP mail and encrypted disk images
but we couldn't control what the customer did with it once decrypted,
and who knows how many mistakes i made leaving decrypted material where
it was not too secure. It was worth it though. I had my lappy nicked
out from under my arm on the Brussels Metro and none of it made the
papers.
4(c) It is even more difficult to securely delete mail if you are using
something like Entourage that places everything in one basket. I
couldn't find out how that could be done, so I never considered using
Entourage for mail for more than a few microseconds.