- #Completly clear out mac for selling how to#
- #Completly clear out mac for selling full#
- #Completly clear out mac for selling pro#
- #Completly clear out mac for selling software#
> echo 'The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.'
(Warning: if you do this, you’re going fill your disk with junk-25,000 copies of a 4.6 megabyte file containing 100,000 copies of the phrase “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.”-enough to fill half a 256 gigabyte SSD, which was my goal.) $ for n in `seq 100000` To do this, I took the Ann Arbor office loaner MacBook-recently erased from its last borrower-and half-filled its disk with a bunch of files. The first thing I needed to do to test this out was fill a disk with data I could easily find again. The easiest way to look for data to be recovered on a disused disk is to scan it, beginning to end, and look for patterns that indicate useful data. Creating Some Data to FindĪ disk-any disk-is basically a giant file, the size of the entire disk. I decided to look into whether a Disk Utility erase does leave easy-to-read breadcrumbs behind, or whether it cleans up after itself. When a secure erase is requested, that key is destroyed, leaving all the encrypted data unreadable.Īpple, being Apple, isn’t telling us (at least, not anywhere I can find) if their Disk Utility erase process is actually a secure erase. That key is kept on the drive, and all data written to it is encrypted with that key. It’s a close cousin to full-disk encryption, and it’s called a secure erase.Ī new drive that’s capable of secure erase has a random encryption key generated for it on day one. Thankfully, there’s a way that you can have a modern hard drive-old-style spinning or solid-state-erased very quickly, and securely.
#Completly clear out mac for selling how to#
But it leaves a lot of data behind, which is why you’ll find plenty of articles advising how to use the macOS command line to force a hard-drive-style secure erase-where you overwrite it with random data many times-on a solid-state drive. They did this for speed overwriting all the data on a disk takes many hours.
#Completly clear out mac for selling software#
If you just did a simple, quick erase on a hard drive ten years ago, any competent data recovery software would turn up a goldmine of data.Įrasing a disk the quick way in those days only put a new filesystem header on the front of the disk, like replacing the table of contents of a book with an empty one, but leaving the rest of the pages in the book intact. This advice puts people like myself, who have had long histories with hard drives and understand how they “delete” data-by leaving it around and just “losing track” of it-on high alert. The Fallback WayĪpple recommends that, if you’re giving away or selling your Mac, you should simply erase it with Disk Utility first.
#Completly clear out mac for selling full#
Since the key is cryptographically secured by your password, you just need to not sign into the computer-but you can also erase the encrypted key, too, with a simple disk erase.īut what if you didn’t use FileVault? Your disk is now full of data that could be sensitive. Everything on the computer is useless without the encryption key, so you simply need to erase the key itself. Every bit of data you write to any disk after you’ve enabled FileVault on it is unreadable without the key, protecting it even if you lose the computer or it’s stolen.Įrasing the computer is now really easy, too. The Best Wayīy far, the best way to keep your data secure is to use full-disk encryption, e.g. This process has always been YMMV, but particularly if your setup is different than mine, expect variations. I’m also running Disk Utility directly on the MacBook itself, not over Target Disk Mode.
#Completly clear out mac for selling pro#
I’m using a MacBook Pro with its built-in SSD. Note: Since this article was first posted, there has been some confusion about the setup used. So how do we go about erasing these computers? And do those processes work?
But that’s not true for modern MacBooks with their solid state drives Apple has even removed the option. With older laptops featuring spinning magnetic hard disk drives, a lengthy, random erase process was the best way to go. One flip-side of that benefit is that all that data remains inside that computer even after we’ve moved on to a new one, unless we take steps to erase it first. In the same amount of physical space that a magazine would take up, we can carry an amazing amount of data with us and work with it anywhere. Laptop computers, especially those with a lot of internal storage, are very convenient.
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