How to securely format your Mac’s hard drive?

If you ever wondered how to erase Mac hard drive to sell your Mac or often work with files and documents of importance, then you are interested in ensuring that your data is securely hidden from third parties. However, even a complete deletion of files cannot provide a high degree of protection, because they still remain on the hard disk until the free space is completely full. So, through complex (and not very) manipulation, information can be restored. so, it becomes important to securely format your Mac hard drive.

To prevent this from happening, after deleting such files, you must clean the hard drive’s free space. So we will explain further in the article in this post and even you can check an amazing tutorial on how to erase Mac hard drive.

Sometimes it is quite useful to format a disk, completely clearing its space. And also, at the time of formatting, you can perform additional useful manipulations, in particular, to break the hard drive into several partitions. In addition, when performing such tasks, you can change the format of the hard drive, which is positively displayed on the device’s performance.

Ways of Formatting:

We suggest that you consider the sequence of actions that lead to a positive result. However, before proceeding to the procedure, it is important to understand which format is preferable for you. For Mac, it is recommended to use a format such as Mac OS Extended, although if you really need to format a hard disk or a removable drive in another format, this possibility also exists. In particular, you can give preference to formats such as FAT, NTFS.

1. To start the “Disk Utility” you need to go to the “Utilities” section of your Mac programs and select the appropriate application. Then select the “Erase” tab – the “Clear free space” button will appear in the lower left corner. This is where the most interesting things begin.
2. In the “Format” line, specify the format that is preferable for you. To do this, click on the arrow indicating the opening of the existing list. From the list that opens, select the option you want. In most cases, it is recommended to choose Mac OS Extended, because this format allows the device to work quickly. On the second line, specify the name of your disk, which you at the moment wanted to format.

OS X provides three methods of erasure, which differ not only in speed but also in the degree of data protection.

• The fastest: If you select this option, zeros will automatically be written on top of the unused disk space. It takes the least time and provides an acceptable level of security.
• Golden mean: This option provides a sufficiently high level of security when erasing data. It is also called the seven-pass cleaning method.

The parameter “Cleaning in seven passes” complies with the DoD 5220.22-M standard. This standard refers to three passes, but the disk utility performs the passes seven times.

• Most Safe: As you already understood, this method will protect your data much better than its predecessors. Clearing of space occurs for 35 calls: in other words, data on top of the disc is recorded 35 times.

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We would recommend the second option – your files and documents will be reliably protected from recovery, without having to wait for several hours. Of course, if you want to be safe, it’s better to use the third method.

3. In some cases, it is very important to erase all the information stored on your Mac without the possibility of its further recovery. If you have such goals before you, then we suggest you use the “Security Settings” button. After clicking on it, new features open up to you, including selecting the number of times to delete the content.

• It is also important to take into account one more technical secret. In particular, you can format the drive on which the operating system on the Mac system is installed, but you can also restart the system first, and at the moment of its next start hold the two buttons Cmd and R at once. In this case, the system will boot into backup mode, so you can format the system drive.
• And also, you can use the button like “Erase free space“. In this case, the erasure process will not apply to the entire disk, but only to its unused part.