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All replies
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Helpful answers
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Dec 12, 2015 10:12 PM in response to Bobby Tby FishingAddict,No, your data is absolutely NOT safe and can very likely be recovered if you sell it at this point. Here is Apple's advice on preparing your laptop:
What to do before selling or giving away your Mac - Apple Support
However, what I would recommend is to boot your laptop to an older Mac OS DVD or bootable flash drive that has the version that shipped with the laptop, then then use that Disk Utility to do a "Secure Erase".
Or, you can still do a secure erase using disk utility in command line. The options are documented in the man page.
man diskutil
I'll have to agree with you that the massive reduction of the usefulness of the previous Disk Utility GUI is one of those choices that I simply can't believe that Apple though was a good idea. It's honestly the only El Capitan change that has actually angered me greatly due to such a massive regression of functionality that is important to all users. If I had my way the new Disk Utility would be thrown out completely and restored to the previous version that allowed easy manipulation of RAID volumes, partitions, images, and secure erase options. Let's hope that reasonable heads prevail at Apple and that these functions will be restored to the new Disk Utility ASAP.
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Dec 12, 2015 11:22 PM in response to Bobby Tby eightyearmarineveteran,Your best bet for complete security is to replace the hard drive. In other words take the hard drive out of the computer and put another one in.
Hope this helps
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Dec 13, 2015 10:23 AM in response to FishingAddictby Limnos,I don't have El Capitan nor am I familiar with all the newest computers. I wonder if this is because Apple is turning more and more towards using SSDs and if SSDs behave differently towards file deletion because they do not use magnetic media with residual traces of data. Still, there's plenty of non-SSD use out there such as big drives in Time Capsules and probably in desktops, and one would still need capability for those. If Apple really has gotten rid of secure erase (rarely needed) then there's likely to be third party utilities which do it.
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Dec 14, 2015 12:53 PM in response to Bobby Tby Limnos,It's puzzling but https://support.apple.com/kb/PH22241 says El Capitan still can erase an entire volume.
Other articles I read agree with you and say Apple removed this because with newer (SSD) drives it is difficult to implement successfully. This article http://www.macissues.com/2015/10/03/how-to-securely-delete-files-in-os-x-10-11-e l-capitan/ provides ways to access this feature in El Capitan, but my reading of this article http://lifehacker.com/how-to-securely-erase-a-solid-state-drive-on-mac-os-x-1580 603733 makes me wonder if it isn't achieving what you think it is (basically a possible reason why Apple removed it).
I think one thing you need to tell us is exactly how old this computer is an what kind of drive it has.
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Dec 14, 2015 1:17 PM in response to Bobby Tby woodmeister50,I would say replace the drive and either put the old drive in an enclosure
and reuse it for backup or take a hammer to it.
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Dec 14, 2015 2:23 PM in response to Bobby Tby lkrupp,I’m not sure what you are talking about because the Disk Utility I have on my El Capitan installation does in deed allow a secure erase function all the way up to and including the Military standard. Selecting the Disk Erase allows only formatting but selecting the Volume Erase and Security Options allows US Department of Defense (DOD) 5220-22 M standard for securely erasing magnetic media with a 7 pass write over.
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Dec 14, 2015 3:56 PM in response to woodmeister50by Limnos,The solution will depend upon the age of the computer and the type of drive. I just went to an Apple Store to ask about your question.
With newer computers with built-in SSD drives the solutions are more limited. You obviously cannot remove the drive. If the computer came with an OS prior to El Capitan you can create an external boot drive by installing OSX on the drive (even a largish flash drive) and use the older OS version's secure erase. Even if all you can install is El Capitan it should be possible to boot to the external and use Terminal commands to erase the internal drive. You can do a limited secure erase this way by booting to the emergency partition but the Apple Store service person warned me that some private date (namely your Apple ID) is still stored on the emergency boot partition and it is better to erase the whole hard drive by using a second hard drive. If you do not have the facilities or comfort with using Terminal or doing these things the Apple Store service person said you could bring the computer to a Store to have it done (I think it was at no cost but you might wish to check first).
If you have an older computer with older OS versions the options are many but I am not going to type them all in. We need to know exactly what computer model and drive you have.
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