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.
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“ 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. Selling your SSD Mac? Cryptographic erasure is a great option. And that’s called a “cryptographic erase.”
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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.
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