Mac NOOBIE Need help This is really pathetic question

yah, drag them to trash, and from finder menu, do 'secure empty trash'..

cheers

Probably not.

jsupetran said:

Will dragging them to the trash do the trick?

Click to expand...

Many computer mavens would probably be able to resurrect those deleted pics of yours.

Depending on how sensitive they are and how thoroughly you want them erased you might want to spend a little money and get a professional HD scrubber like this....

http://www.jiiva.com

abhishekit said:

yah, drag them to trash, and from finder menu, do 'secure empty trash'..

cheers

Click to expand...

This will definitely work... Secure empty the trash, no need for any other utilities.

You can also do a few passes of zeros on a new install from the OS X install disk.

use secure empty trash, the advent of said technology eliminates the need for other utilites

The 'secure empty trash' option writes over the part of your hard drive that those pictures were stored on with (I believe this is the case) eight separate passes of random data. No one will be able to ever resurrect that information without a good deal of prescience.

Then again, have you considered selling your photos?

Secure Empty Trash is probably good enough, but reformatting the drive and overwriting it with zeros gives added security. It's what I'd do. There's also the option of reformatting the drive and writing random data over it 8 times, but that's probably overkill (unless you really are covering criminal activity) and it takes days to do it.

If you have Panther, all the tools to do any of these are in Disk Utility.

you could pull out the hard drive and replace it or run a magnet over it

If you are selling the iMac why aren't you erasing the harddrive first? There could be all sorts of data stored on it that you don't want someone to have. Various website cookies and any saved passwords are the first things to come to mind. I would definately recommend doing a fresh install with your OS cd to wipe everything out before you sell it.

abhishekit said:

yah, drag them to trash, and from finder menu, do 'secure empty trash'..

cheers

Click to expand...

Query here, is this a "Panther" only thing or can "secure empty" be done in Jaguar?

Secure Erase was one of the new features introduced with 10.3.

on second thought, you should probably erase the whole drive. you really should get rid of all the cookies, prefs, etc...