Information still remains after doing a full erase of hard drive

I did a complete HD erasure and reinstall of my iMac today.

I went through the normal set up of the system software, logged into to my iCloud as requested, and opened Safari. As I typed in the first few letters of my website, Safari auto-completed the web address, saying ‘Siri suggests…’ in the browser window. I never use Siri, its always switched off. If the computer was fully erased and I hadn’t placed any personal files etc back on the computer, how would it have known to autofill my personal website address? I tried this with a few other websites I often visit (not popular ones) and the same thing happened.

It really concerns me that this information remains on the hard drive even after a full erase - especially as I plan to sell it soon. Can anyone shed any light on this mystery?

Many thanks

Ps. I am using an iMac 27" Retina Late 2014, running the latest Mojave.

Posted on Aug 8, 2019 12:14 PM

Top-ranking reply

dwb

Level 7

33,226 points

Posted on Aug 9, 2019 8:38 AM

Open System Preferences and click on iCloud (or your account name) depending on which version of the MacOS you are using. You'll see that you have checkmarks by (or boxes by) items like iCloud Drive, Mail, Contacts, Safari, etc. The items that are check marked are stored on iCloud and shared with your other Apple devices if you have any. In your case you erased the drive and then signed back into iCloud which gave you all that information back. Since you have a checkmark by Safari, your computer retrieved all your bookmarks etc. That's the information came from.

Why did Siri know about it? Well you may have turned off Siri in terms of searching by speech but all searching is done via Siri. So Siri makes a suggestion whether you ask her in spoken words or typing.

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Information still remains after doing a full erase of hard drive

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