Erasing your disk: For most reasons to erase, including when reformatting a disk or selling, giving away, or trading in your Mac, you should erase your entire disk.
Securely erase your hard drive with Disk Utility. Before Lion, you had to boot from a CD or DVD system disk or a third-party utility, like Disk Warrior, or from an external drive with OS X installed. Paragon Disk Wiper for Mac allows to create a bootable USB-flash drive or external hard drive that will help you to completely erase a whole hard disk, a separate partition or just clean free space. After booting your Mac with the bootable media you will be able to use Wipe Wizard to irreversibly remove your confidential data.
Erasing a volume on your disk: In other cases, such as when your disk contains multiple volumes (or partitions) and you don't want to erase them all, you can erase specific volumes on the disk.
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. Here’s how: Open Disk Utility via your Applications Utilities folder. Select the hard drive you want to securely erase from the list of available drives in the left column.
Erasing a disk or volume permanently deletes all of its files. Before continuing, make sure that you have a backup of any files that you want to keep.
How to erase your disk
How to erase a volume on your disk
Reasons to erase
You can erase at any time, including in circumstances such as these:
About APFS and Mac OS Extended
Disk Utility in macOS High Sierra or later can erase using either the newer APFS (Apple File System) format or the older Mac OS Extended format, and it automatically chooses a compatible format for you.
How to choose between APFS and Mac OS ExtendedMac Disk Utility Wipe Hard Drive
Disk Utility tries to detect the type of storage and show the appropriate format in the Format menu. If it can't, it chooses Mac OS Extended, which works with all versions of macOS. If you want to change the format, answer these questions:
How to identify the format currently in use
If you want to know which format is currently in use, use any of these methods:
If your disk or volume doesn't appear, or the erase fails
Learn more
Before you hand over your laptop or an old hard drive to a friend or a stranger, you have to be very careful and beware. When you delete a file or data from your drive, it’s not really gone. Your system marks that occupied space as free space now and you can recover those deleted files on your Mac. Generally new data overwrite that space making the deleted data harder to find. So you have to make sure that all personal and important are cleaned off. Formatting won’t help you in this case. Instead you have to securely wipe the hard drive.This guide will tell you how to securely wipe a hard drive on your Mac.
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Why you need to wipe a hard drive?
Wiping your hard drive data is necessary as it may be recovered by it’s new user and that person can use that data to harm you. Some things such as identity theft, credit-card fraud, bank fraud, hacking, your auto save passwords, emails, browsing history and personal content can be used to blackmail you or commit crime in your name. So it is advisable to erase your hard drive to reduce the risks.
How to Securely Erase Data from Your Mac and External Drives?
You can use Disk Utility to securely erase hard drive in mac or an external hard drive. All you have to do is follow the steps given below:
1.Wiping your hard drive will erase everything. So it’s better to back-up your data in an external source before wiping your drive.
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2.Open the apple menu and restart your computer. Then wait for your mac to restart.
3.After the system restarts press and hold the Command+R keys.
Wipe A Mac
4.Hold the Command+R keys until you see the Apple logo.
5.After that a window named “OS X Utilities” pops up.
6.Click on the Disc Utility option as shown in the image below and click on continue.
7.Select the hard drive you want to erase from the available drives list in the left column.
8.You have to be very careful at this moment. Make sure you select only hard drives and not partition.
9.Once you have selected your drive, click on ‘Erase’ button.
10.After doing so the system will ask you to name the hard drive after erasing it and how you want to format the drive. The default settings are preferable.
Wipe Mac Disk
11.Then select the ‘Security Option’ button.
12.A window will pop up asking you how you want to erase your drive. Fastest way is the default. Adjust the slider and select the option which you want. You can choose from the following options.
(a)Fastest (Least preferred): This option doesn’t erase your drive securely and a disc recovery application may be able to recover the files.
(b)Option 2: It erases the information used to use your files and writes over the data two times.
(c)Option 3: It erases the information used to use your files and writes over the data 3 times.
(d)Most secure: It erases the information used to get access to your files and writes over the data 7 times.
As the option 1(fastest) is least secure it is foolish to choose it. Option 4 is most secure but it will take a lot of time. So I suggest you to choose from Option 2 or Option 3 depending how securely you want to wipe it out.
This method works for all hard drive (internal or external). But if you want to erase your startup drive you have to boot your computer from an external source. You can use Diskmaker X to create a bootable external source.
Wipe Mac Clean And ReinstallHow to Securely Erase a Mac SSD or a flash drive?
Solid state drives or flash drive stores data differently. So using Disc Utility is a bad choice. It may affect your drive memory cells or affect it’s performance. There is a simple way to erase your SSD by using FileVault 2 . In FileVault 2 the full-disk encryption (FDE) option keeps your startup drive encrypted all times. When you boots your system with a FileVault encrypted account, OS X encrypts everything written to disk.
You can erase the File Vault encrypted drive using Disc Utility. But before erasing the system will ask you to unlock the drive. To unlock the drive you need to enter the password for the FileVault enabled account. If successful, disc will be unlocked and erased.
Mar 12, 2020 Find the appropriate download link in the upgrade instructions for each macOS version: macOS Catalina, macOS Mojave, or macOS High Sierra Installers for each of these macOS versions download directly to your Applications folder as an app named Install macOS Catalina, Install macOS Mojave, or Install macOS High Sierra. Mac os x intall app. Nov 29, 2017 How to download older Mac OS X versions via the App Store. If you once had purchased an old version of Mac OS X from the App Store, open it and go to the Purchased tab. There you’ll find all the installers you can download. However, it doesn’t always work that way.
Erasing a File Vault encrypted drive will make the drive data irrecoverable.
What if you can’t access the hard drive?
If you cannot access the drive then Disc Utility won’t help you in this case. Professional data recovery companies may help you in this case. Hard drive platters can be extracted from the drive enclosure and read out using specialized equipment. So smashing or breaking your hard drive is your best option.
Read Also:
Conclusion
You can use FileVault,Disk Utility and Mac Washing Machine to encrypt and erase your startup or external hard drive.You can always hire a professional service.After wiping your mac hard drive you can wave it goodbye.
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December 2020
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