By a show of hands, how many Mac users reading this have ever given away or sold an old Mac after buying a new Mac?
It’s common practice to sell or do a hand-me-down handoff of old Macs. Do you wipe the Mac’s hard disk drive so none of your personal data can be retrieved? Erasing and reinstalling OS X seems like a good idea, but guess what? All your old files are still there.
Making A CleanExit Mac
Generally speaking, there are a number of easy and straightforward ways to prepare a Mac to be sold or handed off to someone.
The easy way is to create a new administrative user, login as that user, and then delete your old user account (this assumes you’ve already copied your files to a new Mac).
That works and it’s fast. What doesn’t work is file security. Even after deleting your user account, files can still be found by hackers and ne’er-do-wells of the lower order. Even using Disk Utility to repartition a Mac doesn’t get rid of all your old files.
Full on security comes form utilities like CleanExit, a secure hard disk drive wiping solution which wipes out all traces of the data that once thrived on your Mac. Once used, even hackers with plenty of recovery utilities won’t be able to find your old files.
How CleanExit works is dead simple.
Select the disk drive to wipe, click. CleanExit works on Macs, Windows PCs, and most Linux PCs. The wipe may take awhile depending upon the size of the hard disk drive and the number of files, but when it’s done so are the files.
This utility also works on most IDE, SATA and eSATA hard drives, plus FireWire, USB, Flash media like thumb drives, and even digital camera cards. Mac users have something similar in Disk Utility which has Secure Erase Options which writes a single pass of zeros over the entire disk. It’s a bit more cumbersome to use, but it’s free and works well.
Bill Simpsen says
The “System Requirements” page for CleanExit says it works on Intel Macs that have CD/DVD drives. There is only one mac (the aging Macbook Pro 13) that has an optical drive. Either there is an error in the system requirements you you have just endorsed a program that does nothing more than Disk Utility (which comes free with every Mac) and does not work on the vast majority of shipping Macs.
iggy pence says
Actually, it will work on any Mac. You just need to have a way to boot up the utility so it can wipe the Mac’s disk. External USB, external CD/DVD/SuperDrive. I suspect it will work in Target mode, too; one Mac to another. I’ve used Disk Utility to do the same thing, but the steps are more convoluted. Most Mac users don’t even know what Disk Utility does.
mary contrary says
What is this ‘Disk Utility’ you speak of? And what does it do? And why would I need to wipe my Mac’s disk drive down to a level where the NSA cannot find my email? I’ve got nothing to hide. Methinks this noise is much ado about not much.
Bill Simpsen says
Most Mac users also don’t know what CleanExit does, or that it exists. Why encourage Mac owners to spend $20 and the potential cost of an external drive (I abandoned optical years ago) to do something that Disk Utility can do? And the implication that Disk Utility can’t erase data is simply wrong, as admitted later in the article.
Any Mac containing a recovery partition offers, in one place, all the tools necessary to securely wipe the disk and re-install a clean OS. Why not mention that?
CleanExit may offer some advantage over Disk Utility that makes it worth spending $20-$100. By ignoring Disk Utility, Mac360 missed the opportunity to show what that advantage is.
Homer Simpson says
Most Mac users also don’t know what Disk Utility does, or that it exists. Even the hidden recover partition is hidden to most Mac users. Why encourage Mac users to try something they don’t know how to use?
I’m curious to know how you would wipe a Mac’s disk drive using Disk Utility while the Mac is still running. You do realize that not all Macs have a recovery partition, right? I have three Macs, and only one is running Yosemite. So, a simple app like this Clean Exit tool could be useful.
And why pee on someone else’s parade? Shame on you. Offer alternatives, sure, but there’s no need to get snarky. I like reading Mac360 because they highlight many different utilities which you seldom read about elsewhere.
STL says
I’d use Disk Utility. Just select the erase / secure option
Included with OS X, simple and without any significant hoops to handle.