supercouture.blogg.se - Reformatting external drive for mac

Reformatting external drive for mac how to#
Reformatting external drive for mac for mac#
Reformatting external drive for mac install#
Reformatting external drive for mac full#
Reformatting external drive for mac password#

A disk recovery application may be able to recover the files.

Security Option 1 (Fastest) – This option does not securely erase the files on the disk.

If you move the slider to the right, you’ll see other, more secure options. As the default option indicates, it is the fastest way to erase a drive, but data recovery applications may be able to recover your files. 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.

Reformatting external drive for mac how to#

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.

Reformatting external drive for mac password#

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.

Reformatting external drive for mac full#

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. All Rights Reserved.How To How to Securely Erase Data from Your Mac and External Drives All Rights Reserved.Īll trademarks are the property of their respective holders.

Click on Erase on the bottom of the right-hand pane and click on Erase again when the warning message comes up.

In the Name field you can type in a name of your choice to identify the drive.

Reformatting external drive for mac for mac#

Click on the Erase tab up top and under the heading of Volume Format select MS-DOS for Mac & Windows users, or select Mac OS Extended for Mac only users.

On the bottom of the right-hand pane you will see a Partition button, click on that and click on Partition again when the warning message comes up.

Reformatting external drive for mac install#

Check Install OS 9 Drivers if you wish to use the drive in OS 9.Otherwise, to use the drive strictly for the Mac, choose Mac OS Extended under the Volume heading. If you need to use the drive on both Mac & Windows, then select Free Space under the Volume heading.On the right-hand pane, click on the Partition tab.On the left-hand pane locate the drive you wish to format, click and highlight it.Open up Disk Utility (Hard Drive/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility).If you need to reformat a drive using OSX's built-in Disk Utility, here are the steps.