Wiping free space on an OS X volume

Disk Utility.

You'll find it in /Applications/Utilities/

Just look under the Erase tab.

File slack

Apple's Disk Utility, however, does not seem to wipe file slacks when wiping free space, resulting in an incomplete erase of free space. File slacks is the space after a file's data ends and until the file system block ends, and on a modern harddrive it can constitute gigabytes of data. Forensic investigators frequently find interesting information in file slack.

To wipe free space AND file slack, you need to use Jetico's BCWipe.

For a tutorial, see http://wipeosx.wordpress.com/

userXMZ said:

Apple's Disk Utility, however, does not seem to wipe file slacks when wiping free space, resulting in an incomplete erase of free space. File slacks is the space after a file's data ends and until the file system block ends, and on a modern harddrive it can constitute gigabytes of data. Forensic investigators frequently find interesting information in file slack.

To wipe free space AND file slack, you need to use Jetico's BCWipe.

For a tutorial, see http://wipeosx.wordpress.com/

Click to expand...

Does Jetico's BCWipe work on imac? And is there a free alternative?

userXMZ said:

Apple's Disk Utility, however, does not seem to wipe file slacks when wiping free space, resulting in an incomplete erase of free space. File slacks is the space after a file's data ends and until the file system block ends, and on a modern harddrive it can constitute gigabytes of data. Forensic investigators frequently find interesting information in file slack.[/URL]

Click to expand...

AFAIK, this is no problem on HFS+ volumes, because (Mac) OS X writes zeroes in each block before it writes the data in the block. (Mac) OS X does this since Mac OS 8.1 (no, not 10.8.1).