How to Secure Erase Data on Mac OS X

Are you planning to sell, or perhaps donate your Mac computer? What about your data? Have you completely erased or wiped your significant data from the hard drive?..

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Identity thefts are rampant these days; our computers are our confidants for the most part and we store a lot of confidential information in our computers thinking that we will have them forever. However, computers do get old and do need to be replaced after some time.

It is therefore very important that you completely remove the data from your hard drive before you either donate or sell your computer. Simply deleting your files, or even formatting your hard drive does not give ensure safety from identity theft. Deleted files can be recovered from one’s hard drive and can be misused by malicious users.

Deleted Files Can Be Recovered

Mac OS X operating system uses the file system to store, access, organize, and manipulate files on the hard drive. Every file or folder that is stored on your Mac hard drive has a unique entry in the file system. The operating system references this entry to locate and access folders and files from your Mac hard drive.

You should know that when you delete a file in your Mac hard drive, only the file reference deleted. The file, in fact, remains intact on the drive, though you might not be able to see it. Since you do not see it, you will believe that the file is gone, and also because Mac OS X cannot locate and access the deleted file because the file's reference has been deleted. Even though it might seem that the file is gone forever, the file is, in fact, very much recoverable by using Mac data recovery software.

Formatting Does Not Erase Your Data

Formatting your Mac hard drive removes the entire file system from the hard drive and makes it as a RAW. However, know that data recovery is possible from a RAW Mac OS X hard drive too. Your confidential data are still at stake for theft and misuse.

You could try physically destroying your Mac hard drive if you really want to ensure that no one ever steals your data. However, this way you will lose a perfectly good hard drive; you will neither be able to use it yourself, not sell it, or give it away.

How to Safety Erase Mac Hard Drive

To ensure safe removal of your data, you need to overwrite your data several times over, so that no recovery is possible. When data is overwritten in the same spot several times over, all previous data is erased; a number of consecutive overwrites ensures that even the most sophisticated software out there will not be able to sift through layers of junk to get to your confidential data.

For this purpose, Mac OS X operating system provides an inbuilt utility to erase your hard drive Mac, called Disk Utility.

In Disk Utility, select the drive you want to erase; in the Erase Tab of Disk Utility, use the Security Options button to open the Secure Erase Options page. Mac’s Disk Utility offers you the following four options to erase hard drive Mac.

·         Don't Erase Data: This option only rewrites the headers on the disk. Files can be recovered by forensics, disk utilities, and other advanced recovery software.

·         Zero Out Data: There are forensics utilities that, albeit expensive and time consuming, can retrieve zeroed-out data.

·         7-Pass Erase: This is considered sufficient by government standards to erase data from a disk. It writes random data over the disk seven times. It may take several hours or more to complete this process.

·         35-Pass Erase: This makes it absolutely impossible to regain any data off the drive. This option takes an extremely long time, possibly more than one day.

Usually, people are satisfied using the 7-Pass Erase option. Owing to the fact that overwriting an entire disk several times over takes an inordinately long time, people usually give the 35-Pass Erase option a pass unless very critical information such as Government or corporate confidential data needs to be erased.

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