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How to securely delete files from an early 2013, Intel based, MacBook Pro with SSD

Have older MacBook pro's (early 2013, Intel, macOS Catalina, 10.15) I want to prepare to be recycled and I want to erase the files to a reasonably secure level... Harder to do with a Solid State Driver, right??? What's the best thing to do to prepare such computers for recycling??? Included as an option would be to open up the computer and remove to mechanically destroy the SSD... Is that doable??? Easy to locate compared to what is battery??? Need help to get more than one computer ready to be recycled... Help would be much appreciated... thanks...

Earlier Mac models

Posted on Aug 7, 2023 5:42 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Aug 7, 2023 6:13 PM

Follow these instructions: What to do before you sell, give away, trade in, or recycle your Mac - Apple Support


Flash memory such as may have been originally installed in your Mac or in a solid state drive does not require nor does it benefit from a multi-pass a/k/a "secure" erase procedure that may have been applicable to magnetic media (and even then its effectiveness was debatable).


You can physically remove and destroy the storage device if you wish but it's not necessary. FileVault makes its data completely irretrievable and worthless without its encryption key — which itself becomes irretrievably and permanently destroyed upon erasure: Encrypt Mac data with FileVault - Apple Support

4 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Aug 7, 2023 6:13 PM in response to Robert Paris

Follow these instructions: What to do before you sell, give away, trade in, or recycle your Mac - Apple Support


Flash memory such as may have been originally installed in your Mac or in a solid state drive does not require nor does it benefit from a multi-pass a/k/a "secure" erase procedure that may have been applicable to magnetic media (and even then its effectiveness was debatable).


You can physically remove and destroy the storage device if you wish but it's not necessary. FileVault makes its data completely irretrievable and worthless without its encryption key — which itself becomes irretrievably and permanently destroyed upon erasure: Encrypt Mac data with FileVault - Apple Support

Aug 7, 2023 8:48 PM in response to Robert Paris

You originally asked about recycling that Mac, not someone else's future use of it.


Either way Apple's selling / trade in / recycling instructions are more than sufficient. FileVault renders data utterly irretrievable to anyone without its password. Erasing it eliminates even that possibility, while retaining some future owner's ability to repurpose that Mac as his or her own.

Aug 7, 2023 7:32 PM in response to John Galt

I use File Vault and have for the past three MacBook pro's including the one I speak of above??? Is that enough, to delete most of the files but to also know that anything that might be retrieved would be unusable to anyone else??? I've also considered what you also suggested, removing the SSD's and destroying them but that, of course, renders the machine unusable to anyone else....

Aug 8, 2023 8:15 AM in response to Robert Paris

Filevault's purpose is to encrypt the data so once the decryption key has been destroyed by erasing the drive, the encrypted data is no longer accessible. With an SSD (at least ones with TRIM enabled like an original Apple OEM SSD), then even a simple erase with Disk Utility will destroy all data on the SSD due to how SSDs work. Once the SSD blocks have been declared to be un-needed by macOS, the TRIM feature will reset those SSD blocks to zero or an indeterminate state. I have personally verified this occurs by using a macOS command line utility to look at the raw data on the SSD.

How to securely delete files from an early 2013, Intel based, MacBook Pro with SSD

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