#ERASE FREE SPACE DISK UTILITY HOW TO#
#ERASE FREE SPACE DISK UTILITY MAC OS#
#ERASE FREE SPACE DISK UTILITY INSTALL#
#ERASE FREE SPACE DISK UTILITY PASSWORD#

I wrote a DOD compliant drive wipe utility many years ago. If disposing of the drive, easier just to drill through it a few times to stop some one from taking your data. It adds no value unless you are need to hide illegal or confidential activity.

#ERASE FREE SPACE DISK UTILITY HOW TO#

“ How to Securely Erase Data from Your Mac and External Drives.The other answers are correct. This article from Intego has some good background and additional information. I’ve found that it’s always helpful to read more for a broder perspective and sanity check. The drive is now empty, newly formatted and all the previous data is leftover, encrypted garbage.

Launch Disk Utility, select the drive, then select the Erase option.

Select it in the Finder, right-click, and select Encrypt….

Back up any data you want to preserve that’s on on the external Flash drive or SSD.

See Apple’s support document, “ Encrypt and protect a disk with a password.” You may want to securely erase an external Flash drive before selling or discarding. Do CMD-Q when the Mac reboots and the set up process first starts.Īnd now, phew!, you’re ready to sell your Mac.

#ERASE FREE SPACE DISK UTILITY INSTALL#

You may wish to install some version of macOS now to place the machine in the out-of-the-box mode.The SSD now contains only unreadable, encrypted garbage. Now erase the disk normally, using the standard erase option. Select Unlock “volume name” from the File menu. When done, restart you Mac in Recovery mode (CMD-R) as described at the beginning of this article.

This process can take a long time, hours, and there is no progress bar.

#ERASE FREE SPACE DISK UTILITY PASSWORD#

Write down the password on paper until you establish a safe place for this password.

If you haven’t already, go to System Preferences > Security & Privacy > FileVault and enable it.

Back up any data you want to keep on your boot drive.

“ How to Securely Erase a Mac SSD.” In brief: If someone were to examine the unused space on the newly erased drive with a digital forensic tool, all that would be seen is encrypted nonsense.įor an Mac’s boot drive, Peter Cohen explains the process nicely. (This what happens when you do a master reset on your iOS device.) Then the SSD is erased and formatted as usual. This renders the information stored on the drive unreadable. Cryptographic Eraseīasically, a cryptographic erase means encrypting the drive, then throwing a way the encryption key. And that’s called a “cryptographic erase.” Selling your SSD Mac? Cryptographic erasure is a great option.

#ERASE FREE SPACE DISK UTILITY MAC OS#

The very best description of the difficulty conventional tools have in completely erasing an SSD comes from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF.) The article is: “ How to: Delete Your Data Securely on Mac OS X.” Skip to the very last major section labeled: “Secure Deletion on Solid-state Disks (SSDs), USB Flash Drives, and SD Cards.” It’s a long paragraph, but the language is simple as it describes how SSD “ wear leveling” undermines the best efforts of erasure tools to completely overwrite SSD data.Īs a result of how SSDs write data, the best practice today involves going one step beyond the simple process of using Apple’s Disk Utility “standard erase” for an SSD. That last throw-away comment, “for more security,” suggests that there’s a little more to cover, so that’s the next topic. For more security, consider turning on FileVault encryption when you start using your SSD drive. These options are not needed for an SSD drive because a standard erase makes it difficult to recover data from an SSD. With an SSD drive, Secure Erase and Erasing Free Space are not available in Disk Utility. You’ll also want to read “ OS X: About Disk Utility‘s erase free space feature.” A note at the end starts to get to the heart of the matter. However, that Apple article skips over the nuance of completely erasing an SSD. “ What to do before you sell or give away your Mac.” Item #6 in that document launches the discussion and links to a pretty good article: “ How to reinstall macOS.” That article, by the way, has a nifty table that summarizes which versions of macOS you can install from the recovery partition. The first thing to do is read Apple support article. You’ll want to securely erase that SSD, but it’s a bit tricker than a plain hard disk.

These days, because SSDs have been an option for Macs for almost a decade, it’s very likely that you have, or will soon have, a Mac for sale that boots from an SSD. Securely erasing a hard disk isn’t hard to do, and it’s been discussed in many places.

Back when I did that last, the Mac had a hard disk. It’s been awhile since I sold an old Mac.

Erase free space disk utility