Preparing Mac for resale

Question

Level 1

14 points

Preparing Mac for resale

I have purchased a new Mac Mini and I want to sell the old one. I will migrate the documents I want to bring over and delete all personal documents on the old Mac. It is running OS 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard) because I use MS Office 2004 and it requires Rosetta to run. Subsequent versions of Mac OS do not support Rosetta so I plan to resell it with OS 10.6.8 and MS Office and other applications.

After I delete personal documents (including photos, emails, etc.) on the old Mac, is there a way to safely erase the remaining free space? Also is there a program that I can run tom tell me which applications require Rosetta so that I don't bring them over? Any other advice on carrying out this transfer would be appreciated. I have learned that the quickest way to transfer files is via an Ethernet connection between the two machines with the old Mac started as the source disk.

Mac mini, Mac OS X (10.6.8), Canon printer, Linksys wifi-router

Posted on Dec 5, 2014 11:19 AM

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Answer 1

Niel

Level 10

726,707 points

Dec 5, 2014 11:22 AM in response to cloud4mac

1. Securely delete them and then erase the drive normally.

2. Choose About this Mac from the Apple menu, click on More Info, and look at the Applications section.

(117705)

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Answer 2

cloud4mac Author

Level 1

14 points

Dec 5, 2014 12:50 PM in response to Niel

1. That's easy. I didn't realize there was the ability to erase only free space. I assume transfering personal files to the Trash and Emptying it is sufficient to remove it entirely after the Erase Free Space.

2. I listed all the Applications and there's a lot of them. Am I right in concluding that those with a kind of "PowerPC" are the ones that requite Rosetta to run? Also, is the the "64 Bit (Intel)" parameter a consideration? Is there is a selection feature on the transfer utility to Yosemite such that I can select which documents and applications to transfer?

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Answer 3

Niel

Level 10

726,707 points

Dec 5, 2014 1:02 PM in response to cloud4mac

1. Securely deleting the existing files is enough. You don't need to use the Erase Free Space option unless you insecurely deleted a file you meant to securely delete.

2. PowerPC applications require Rosetta, but the 64-bit parameter isn't relevant for this purpose.

(117712)

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Answer 4

Eric Root

Level 10

684,027 points

Dec 6, 2014 7:37 AM in response to cloud4mac

Selling old Mac

Selling old Mac (2)

Selling old Mac (3)

Selling old Mac (4) Apple support

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Answer 5

cloud4mac Author

Level 1

14 points

Mar 5, 2015 10:35 AM in response to Eric Root

I'd like to know if this is a good way to delete all my files from a Mac Mini prior to selling it:

1. Create a new additional Admin user.

2. Delete my existing user which will delete all the files associated with it.

3. Log in with the new admin user and Erase Free Space overwriting 7 times.

It seems to me this is an easier way to delete all the personal docuemnts and files rather than trashing them one by one.

Am I right?

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Answer 6

WZZZ

Level 6

13,220 points

Mar 5, 2015 11:21 AM in response to cloud4mac

If you're going to secure erase anything, a one pass zero will do it. 7 pass is complete overkill. And were you to do a 7 pass, depending on the size of the drive, you might be sitting around twiddling your thumbs for many many hours until it completes.

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Answer 7

cloud4mac Author

Level 1

14 points

Mar 5, 2015 2:02 PM in response to WZZZ

Thanks WZZZ for that commnet. I have looked elsewhere and find that a once write over is sufficient. There's nothing the NSA would want on my computer.

But what about the deleting of files? Is deleting my admin user id a quick and safe way to do that?

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Answer 8

WZZZ

Level 6

13,220 points

Mar 6, 2015 6:04 AM in response to cloud4mac

I was just testing a Mac Mini that I bought from eBay and which needed to be returned. The drive was in such bad shape that a one pass zero or secure erase of any kind would never have made it. Instead, since I had no personally identifiable information on that machine, I just deleted the user I had been testing with from Users & Groups (Accounts in Snow Leopard). It came installed with Yosemite, so not sure if this option is available in Snow, but I deleted that user with the option secure delete. It happened almost instantly, so not sure what secure delete for an account actually does, since it would have needed a bit of time at least to write zeros to that account, even with hardly anything there. Plus, although I have Snow, I have never needed to use that option in Snow, if it's even available there.

So a long winded reply to say that I just don't know how secure a "secure" delete of a user account is. I wasn't that bothered because, as I already said, I hadn't put any personally identifiable information on that machine. I did however want to be sure it securely deleted my wireless router password in Keychain. Didn't want to leave that lying around to be recovered, even on a drive that was about to die completely. So I hope it nuked that securely, which shouldn't have taken much time.

Maybe someone else here will know just what a secure delete of an account actually involves. If it does some kind of overwriting with zeros or random zeros and ones, or what the "secure" in secure delete really means. Actually, it's called “Erase home folder securely.”

Apple doesn't provide much more information than this:

https://support.apple.com/kb/PH10754?locale=en_US

Here, someone is saying it does a 35 pass overwrite.(Makes me wonder then, if when I did it, it really did that). I hope that drive dies completely and very soon.

http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/30639/issue-with-deleting-user-account

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Answer 9

WZZZ

Level 6

13,220 points

Mar 6, 2015 6:16 AM in response to WZZZ

Looks like the secure delete option for an account should be perfectly secure, that is, if it even exists in Snow. However, and a big however, a 35 pass (if Snow does that), even of the user only may, depending on how much data there is, leave you twiddling your thumbs for days and days. I think I would wipe the entire drive with a one pass zero.

I once did a one pass zero on an 80GB drive. Older iMac G5. Slower processor there, but it took roughly an hour and a quarter, if I recall. So multiply that by 35 for the size of your account.

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