Quick Question - Just sold my MBP

[dinamo9]

I just sold my Macbook pro, and it was really rushed process of me cleaning the hard drive. What I did was Zero out the drive, however as I gave my macbook pro to the person that was buying it, there was still 8 minutes left in the process of clearing it. It had been running for 1 hours and 20 minutes up until that point. I just have a concern of, if he was able to cancel the process would all of my data have remained on my computer or just whatever was left in the last 8 minutes of the zeroing.

He seemed trustworthy, it's just I no idea what information would be accesible if he did cancel it somehow.

Anything to worry about or should I relax?

Thanks everyone

 

[adpeace]

Should be fine. Only the last eight minute's worth of disk will be still available.

 

[THX1139]

if you only had 8 minutes left to finish, why did you give it to him?

 

[dinamo9]

It was a bonehead move. It was a combination of me having to be at work and not having time to wait for it to finish plus the fact that he wanted the mbp the same day and I only had only 3 hours to backup and zero the hard drive. Now i'm really worried that he may have access to my personal information as he is an IT guy by profession. I really don't want to have to worry about this. What could this guy do if he cancelled the zeroing? Should I contact him?

 

[arphitha03]

Dont worry

Hey i dont think u should worry about it.. your eight minutes will still be available. Such things have happened to me also but nothing goes wrong so dont worry..

Lead Life With Style

 

[Schtumple]

To be honest, even if he had cancelled it, the chances of those last 8 minutes of wiping containing anything remotely personal are very slim.

I mean do you keep your bank details in a text document? If you do, that's not a wise move

You will be fine, you have nothing to worry about.

 

[California]

There is almost no way he could recover the system from a nearly wiped hard drive, so there would be no way to read it because he could not start up the hard drive as it was nearly cleared.

 

[clyde2801]

Unless this guy works for the FBI computer forensics lab, you're probably safe.

 

[Abstract]

There is almost no way he could recover the system from a nearly wiped hard drive....

Exactly. Your computer saves files all over the harddrive, not just sequentially. All files aren't saved as one big thing. A file is actually broken up into small fragments and scattered all over a hard disk. Remember disk defragmentation on Windows? That just puts all the fragments of all your files into sequence, which technically should speed up the process of opening a file.

If you had nekkid photos of yourself on your harddrive, the file probably would have been split into many many pieces, and the large majority of the file fragments would have been wiped. What are they going to do with a few file fragments?

You can't reconstruct a pizza with only one slice. Once the other 9 slices are gone, they're gone.

 

[dinamo9]

Awesome, I get that i'm safe! Thanks everyone.

Now the only other thing is that I backed up my files using the 'backup' application on my mac which created a .plist and saved it on my external harddrive. Does anyone have experiance restoring this kind of file because when I get my new iMac in 2 weeks I really hope it works okay. Thanks!