Wipe Mac Hard Drive and Protect your Data with disk utility

Today, data recovery software are available worldwide facilitating data recovery from hard drives, flash memory, CD/DVD, and other removable media irrespective of how your data was lost. These software are available for a variety of operating systems, such as Mac OS X and Windows, recovering data efficiently. However, what in case you do not want the data to be recovered? Can we neglect the probability of data recovery on Mac? You might be thinking that why someone would wish for his data to go beyond recovery. Well, situations are there. Let us take a scenario making the uncertainties clear.

You own a Mac with large amount of data stored on it. Since the hard drive is about to get full, you need to upgrade it to the one with much higher capacity and move all the data to it. Then, what is to be done with the hard drive that is recently emptied? You may format and put it up for sale; however, you certainly do not want the buyer to recover data from it. Similarly, imagine the case of a professional whose every single file is precious. Does a simple hard drive formatting prevent the data from recovery? Mac disk wiping is the only way to protect your precious data from such unauthorized access, as wiping the hard drive deletes the data permanently, i.e. beyond recovery. Disk Utility in Mac OS X facilitates wiping Mac’s hard drive; however, those who do not prefer using Disk Utility for disk operations can opt for any external disk wipe software of Mac. For the time being, let us see how Disk Utility wipes the hard drive on Mac.

• Launch Disk Utility.

(Navigate to Applications >Utilities folder > Disk Utility)

• Attach the hard drive you need to securely erase (i.e. wipe) on Mac.
• Select this hard drive in the left pane of Disk Utility.

(Make sure the hard drive does not contain any data)

• Now, go to the Erase tab in the right pane
• Click Security Options and move the slider to Most Secure in Secure Erase Options window

(In some previous Mac versions, you can choose either 7-Pass Erase or 35-Pass Erase. These algorithms write junk over the drive and your data goes beyond recovery.)

• Click OK to erase the hard drive.

Mac OS X Lion provides 7-Pass Erase algorithm. Since the process is time and resources consuming, it is recommended to let it run overnight and get the hard drive wiped in the morning.