Click Security Options at the bottom of the dialog.Īnother 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.)Ĭlick the Erase button in the toolbar. Select the hard drive you want to securely erase from the list of available drives in the sidebar. (For the examples in this article, I’ll be using a flash drive, but the display is the same for hard drives as well.) You’ll see your Mac’s startup drive, and any other drives connected to it.

Launch Disk Utility it’s in the Utilities folder in your Applications folder. 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 driveĮven 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. 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. 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.

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.

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.

Why is the data on your drive valuable to hackers? In this article, I’ll explain how to securely erase all sorts of drives: hard drives, flash drives, and SSDs. Whenever you dispose of a Mac, or an external drive, you should securely erase it to ensure that no one can harvest data from it. If you use an external drive for, say, your music and video libraries, then this isn’t the case, but if you use an external drive for backups, there there’s lots of sensitive data on it. Your Mac’s drive is full of sensitive data: all your emails, contacts, private documents, and more. Your Mac, and any external drives you use, may contain important personal data. How To How to Securely Erase Data from Your Mac and External Drives

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