If you decide to securely erase your Mac's hard drive(s), you will first have to back up your information. Next, I will describe the entire procedure of completely clearing personal or sensitive data from your Mac, an easy-to-follow four-step procedure that should give you peace of mind once you give away your computer. When you are securely erasing the hard drive, you are telling the computer to overwrite your files with random data two to seven times (OS X supports 2-, 3- and 7-pass secure erasing). This allows recovery software to scan hard drives and recover data, a quite helpful feat if you've accidentally deleted any of your files.įortunately, there is a way to protect your files from being revived when you part ways with your Mac: securely erasing the hard drive, a process that prevents third parties from recovering your personal data. This happens because even though you tell OS X to delete a file from the hard drive, the file will not be completely deleted since the operating system will only remove the memory reference to the file. There is a very simple procedure that you should follow if you need to remove all your personal data from your Mac, and it will require you to securely format your computer's hard drive or hard drives if it has more than one (as is the case of Mac Pros).Īpple also describes on their support website what one has to do before selling a Mac, and even though their procedure is quite simple to follow, it doesn't take into account the fact that a formatted hard drive will not prevent the buyer to recover files that you thought are lost forever.

If you plan to sell your Mac to get a brand-new one or to give it away because you've already bought a newer model, you must first erase all your personal files to avoid unpleasant surprises afterwards.

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