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. 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.
#What is disk utility secure erase 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. 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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