Your Mac’s drive is full of sensitive data: all your emails, contacts, private documents, and more. When it finally finishes, you can either enter your Apple log information again or leave the laptop as it is so you can sell it without compromising your privacy.Your Mac, and any external drives you use, may contain important personal data. On Macs, users.How To How to Securely Erase Data from Your Mac and External DrivesThe recovery process takes a while because your MacBook needs to download the latest version of the Mac OS X operating system, format your hard drive, and install it. Geo Tracking Retrospect Management Console supports geo tracking with a worldwide map of all users, Retrospect Backup servers, and remote clients, down to the city.Several native features of iCloud use each users iCloud storage allowance, specifically, Backup and restore, and email, Contacts, and Calendars. Retrospect Backup now includes the same detailed backup report for Windows, Mac, Email, Export and the Management Console, ensuring a clear, consistent experience across each product.And check out our full guide to backing up your Mac with Time Machine if that’s the route you choose.There may come a time when you decide to sell your MacBook Pro or just have the urge. Use Time Machine or a third-party app. Make sure to back up any data you want to keep. First test is Surface Scan Test.Before you completely wipe your Mac, there are few steps you should take to protect your data and prevent any other problems later. These DVD DL (Dual Layer) are checked twice.Whether it’s a hard drive in an older Mac or an external hard drive, if it is accessible, you can use Disk Utility to securely erase it. How to securely erase a hard driveEven though all new Macs these days come with SSDs, or flash storage (which I’ll discuss below), there are still plenty of hard drives in use today. So the next best thing is to securely erase them. Also think of photos, videos, chats and again email contents that may include sensitive and personal content that can be used to blackmail you or destroy your reputation.Of course, you can keep every hard drive and flash drive you’ve ever owned to reduce the chances of the above happening, but after a while this method starts taking up a lot of space. Why is the data on your drive valuable to hackers?Hackers are always looking for ways to get personal data to access bank accounts, to find user name / password pairs, that may be reused with other accounts, and to collect data to use in identity theft.Your browser history, auto-saved names and passwords in your browser, email contents, and sensitive documents like bank statements and tax returns, are all very valuable to someone who knows how to use it against you.
Sierra Backup And Reformat For Sale Full Of SensitiveClick Security Options at the bottom of the dialog.Another dialog displays where you can select how thoroughly you want to erase the drive. The default settings are good as is, but you can name it if you want to. A dialog displays asking you what to name the drive after erasing , and how you want to format it. (Make sure you select the drive and not the partition.)Click the Erase button in the toolbar. (For the examples in this article, I’ll be using a flash drive, but the display is the same for hard drives as well.)Select the hard drive you want to securely erase from the list of available drives in the sidebar. You’ll see your Mac’s startup drive, and any other drives connected to it. It erases the information used to access your files and writes over the data 2 times. Security Option 2 – This option writes a pass of random data, and then a single pass of zeros over the entire disk. A disk recovery application may be able to recover the files. Security Option 1 (Fastest) – This option does not securely erase the files on the disk. If you move the slider to the right, you’ll see other, more secure options. Someone will be able to recover your data without much effort. It erases the information used to access your files and writes over the data 7 times.From the above options, Security Option 1 is, of course, the least secure. Security Option 4 (Most Secure) – This option writes multiple passes of zeros, ones, and random data over the entire disk. It erases the information used to access your files and writes over the data 3 times. It writes htwo passes of random data followed by a single pass of known data over the entire disk. ![]() You may not even need to securely erase a hard drive, if you use FileVault, though, again, company policy may require this anyway.If you have FileVault enabled, when it comes time to part with your drive, all you have to do is a basic erase in Disk Utility. In fact, using FileVault is the best protection for any drive. If you want to know how to use FileVault and/or encrypt external drives, see this article. While this may not be the case anymore with current SSD technologies, Apple took the option out of Disk Utility for a reason.By using FileVault to encrypt the drive (startup drive) and Disk Utility to encrypt external drives, all the data on the drive will be garbled, unless someone has the encryption key (your password). You might think that if you can’t access it, neither will someone else. What if the drive is not accessible?If you are unable to mount the drive, whether it’s a hard drive or solid state drive, tools like Disk Utility won’t help you. Without a way to decrypt the data, even if it is recovered, it will be useless. It’s a lot safer than destroying drives at home. See our article How to securely dispose of old hard drives and SSDs to find how to take drives apart and render them useless.If you have a number of drives, you may find it best to use a professional service that uses hard drive shredders. If the controller is the problem, it can be replaced to make the drive functioning again.For drives that are not accessible, you can destroy them. Hard drive platters can be extracted from the drive enclosure and read out using specialized equipment. While a dumpster diver won’t go through the trouble of repairing the drive, someone with more time and motivation certainly can. Total war attila for mac air 2011And don’t forget to follow Intego on your favorite social media channels: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. Be sure to follow the podcast to make sure you don’t miss any episodes.You can also subscribe to our e-mail newsletter and keep an eye here on Mac Security Blog for the latest Apple security and privacy news. Either way, with these methods you can be sure your data does not end up in the wrong hands.Each week on the Intego Mac Podcast, Intego’s Mac security experts discuss the latest Apple news, security and privacy stories, and offer practical advice on getting the most out of your Apple devices.
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