What do you do with old Macs?

[appleuser15]

so recently my brother wants to sell his Mac, it's the first model they made a couple years back. It has all his school data and I have been told not to sell it, because even if you factory reset there are people out there who can recover the deleted files

So what's your opinion?

 

[vmachiel]

If you boot into the recovery partition you can erase the hard drive. If you go into security settings in the erase prompt, you can chose to do a save erase, which will overwrite everything with blank data a couple of times. This way, now traces are left behind.

 

[vkd]

So my opinion would be so-so.

 

[Fishrrman]

Something I've read about, but never tried myself:

1. Enable FileVault to encrypt the entire drive.
2. Then, boot from the recovery partition (or external source) and RE-initialize the internal drive.

Should make data on the drive un-recoverable.

Again, never tried this myself.

 

[vmachiel]

Something I've read about, but never tried myself:

1. Enable FileVault to encrypt the entire drive.
2. Then, boot from the recovery partition (or external source) and RE-initialize the internal drive.

Should make data on the drive un-recoverable.

Again, never tried this myself.

That would work actually!

 

[Les Kern]

Replace the drive, they are quite inexpensive. Then destroy the original disk. That's the only way to be sure.

 

[Apple fanboy]

so recently my brother wants to sell his Mac, it's the first model they made a couple years back. It has all his school data and I have been told not to sell it, because even if you factory reset there are people out there who can recover the deleted files

So what's your opinion?

One of these? Must be worth a fortune!

You could look at some secure erase software.