I’m in the process of handing a lot of equipment back since I’m leaving my full time position today and I asked a fellow Apple user how to best clear out personal information and make sure they were completely gone after I’ve deleted the files.
He smiled, quickly walked over to my desk, and walked me through the Disk Utility feature which completely erases deleted files for maximum security and peace of mind.
I had no idea:
From Disk Utility’s help file:
When you delete files by emptying the Trash, Mac OS X deletes the information used to access the files but doesn’t actually delete the files. Although the disk space used by deleted files is marked as free space, deleted files remain intact until new data is written over them. As a result, deleted files can be recovered.
You can use Disk Utility to erase the free space used by deleted files by having zeros written over the space once, 7 times, or 35 times. If you have a lot of free space on your disk, overwriting the free space several times can take a long time.
Erasing free disk space does not erase the other files on your disk.
Sweet!
I did 35-pass, just for fun:
🙂
Do you have any other quick mac tips you’d like to share that some people might not know about?
Daniel says
I notice “burn” has a nuke symbol. Does it destroy the hdd or something?
Also, I wish you the best in your transition.
John Saddington says
haha!
Stephen Bateman says
Mac tips!
1. Command + Escape brings up Front Row (a lot of people don’t know that)
2. Most people use Grab for taking a screenshot, but if you use Preview, it will let you choose your file format to save (jpeg, png, tiff I think).
3. iStatPro is a great system monitoring tool that lives in your dashboard.
John Saddington says
i had no idea about the first 2! dude. that’s awesome. thanks stephen!
Andrew says
I love keyboard shortcuts. Here are a few in OS X that I consider to be somewhat unknown.
Option+Command+Eject = Sleep
Control+Command+Eject = Quits all applications, restarts computer
Control+Option+Command+Eject = Quits all applications, shuts down computer
Shift+Volume Up or Volume Down = change volume level without the pop sound effect
Shift+Option+Volume Up or Volume Down = incremental volume adjustment
Shift+Control+Option+Volume Up or Volume Down = incremental volume adjustment without the pop sound effect
John Saddington says
whoa. these are sweet.
Rob says
How long did that take? forever i am guessing
John Saddington says
8 hours.