Preparing MacBook Air for sale?

[rekhyt]

If I were to sell my MacBook Air, how should I best do it? I'd back up my data, naturally, and do a clean install of Mavericks, but how do I make sure that my data is fully wiped?

I was under the impression that the 'secure wipe' mode in Disk Utility (writing it over with 0s and 1s) isn't effective with SSDs.

 

[Weaselboy]

If I were to sell my MacBook Air, how should I best do it? I'd back up my data, naturally, and do a clean install of Mavericks, but how do I make sure that my data is fully wiped?

I was under the impression that the 'secure wipe' mode in Disk Utility (writing it over with 0s and 1s) isn't effective with SSDs.

The secure erase option will be blocked (greyed out) in Disk Util for an SSD. It is very difficult to recover erased data on an SSD. But if you are really concerned about it you can turn on Filevault encryption in Mavericks then wait for the encryption to finish, then boot from either Internet Recovery (command-option-r) or an external Recovery Disk Assistant USB key and erase the entire disk (not just Macintosh HD), then reinstall.

This erases the encrypted volume and effectively makes data retrieval impossible.

The Internet Recovery method will take you back to the OS your machine came with. The USB method will get you back to Mavs.

Also, make sure you do the things listed here first.