Did simple Catalina erase and now want it to be secure?

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Level 1

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Did simple Catalina erase and now want it to be secure?

Well, I hope I didn't blow it here. I am selling my MBP retina and want it to be securely erased. I opened the recovery app and erased the drive (actually the drive group) and reinstalled Catalina. When I saw how fast it completed the task I thought I must have erased improperly and repeated the process.

Now I see what the problem is...SSD. Is there any way to follow the advice I've seen in other posts here to encrypt the drive and then erase and reinstall and know that all of my old data is securely gone?

thanks

tom

MacBook Pro Retina

Posted on May 6, 2020 4:59 PM

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Answer 1

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Barney-15E

Level 10

121,952 points

May 6, 2020 5:46 PM in response to SausalitoDog

Use FileVault to encrypt the drive.

When it is done, boot into Internet Recovery and use Disk Utility to erase the entire drive.

From View button menu, select Show All Devices.
Select the drive device (top, outdented).
Choose APFS, GUID partition table.
Quit Disk Utility.
Reinstall macOS.

Because you didn't encrypt the drive prior to putting data on it, there still could be unencrypted parts of files, but it would take some industrial recovery efforts to get to it.

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Answer 2

SausalitoDog Author

Level 1

130 points

May 7, 2020 1:24 PM in response to Barney-15E

thanks, Barney-

wish i had done it right, but this will probably be safe enough :-) yikes

tom

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Did simple Catalina erase and now want it to be secure?

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