Data Security Part I

If you are ever going to sell your computer, replace or upgrade a hard drive, then I HIGHLY recommend that you wipe the old drive first.

Throwing your data in the trash can and emptying it is not enough. All that does is tell the Operating System that there are free blocks that it could write too. However, unless those blocks are written over, chances are the data could be retrieved using over the counter recovery software.

There is no need to purchase any third party application to sanitize your drive, Apple has this built in. It is the Secure Erase feature found in Disk Utility.

Secure Erase has several options, for the most part, the Zero Out feature will be sufficient. The way the product works is that it writes random I/O 0’s & 1’s across the entire drive. The more passes, the more guaranteed that your data is wiped and the longer it will take.

You can get to it by opening up Disk Utility, highlight your disk on the left, select Erase, then Security Options at the Bottom.