Hi,
I’m in the process of selling my current MacBook Pro, I have signed out of my iCloud,iTunes & messages. I have cleared the hard drive and re-installed Mac OS. Now it has reverted back to setting up the MacBook. I’ve never done this before, and I’m a little paranoid that some of my information is still on there ? Is there anyway there could be after doing this ?
Any help would be much appreciated. :)
MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.13
What to do before you sell, give away, or trade in your Mac - Apple Support
If you followed those steps, you’re fine.
What to do before you sell, give away, or trade in your Mac - Apple Support
If you followed those steps, you’re fine.
Hi,
I just cleared the hard drive called ‘Macintosh HD’ under disk utilities. That’s the only one I have.
I saw another one called mac base system. But I didn’t do anything with that one.
File vault was turned off before I erased the hard drive.
If you laptop uses an Apple SSD, then your data was securely erased due to how SSDs work. Your personal data has been destroyed.
However, if your laptop uses a spinning hard drive, then your data may still be easily accessible using a data recovery app. Since you did not have Filevault enabled you need to write a single pass of zeroes to the hard drive in order to destroy your personal data. You can also enable Filevault and let the encryption process complete, then perform a clean install once more. Personally I find the latter option easier for most users.
If your laptop has a third party SSD, then I'm not sure if a simple erase is sufficient since TRIM may not be enabled on the SSD (especially in recovery mode). In this case having Filevault fully enabled before performing the clean install is best to be 100% certain the data has been destroyed. I've never tested performing a simple erase on a non-Apple SSD to see if all data is gone like it is with an Apple SSD.
Unfortunately the information in the article @neuroanatomist linked assumes a user is using Filevault or is using an Apple SSD.
Does the MacBook use a hard drive or an SSD? If an SSD, is it an original Apple SSD or a third party SSD?
Was Filevault fully enabled before you erased the drive?
Clearing information off MacBook
