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Will Apple look at my files?

N

nimble77

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 30, 2009
2
0
^Title

My mac crashed recently and now won't turn on at all. I've tried all the methods to get it to work, but none have been successful. I went to the store, nothing worked there, and they told me it had to be repaired.

I know I'm gonna have to send it in to Apple for repairs, but since there's no way I can protect my files because my mac's basically dead, I'm worred that someone at the store or repair center might go through them. Any help here is appreciated.

Thanks
 
nimble77 said:
^Title

My mac crashed recently and now won't turn on at all. I've tried all the methods to get it to work, but none have been successful. I went to the store, nothing worked there, and they told me it had to be repaired.

I know I'm gonna have to send it in to Apple for repairs, but since there's no way I can protect my files because my mac's basically dead, I'm worred that someone at the store or repair center might go through them. Any help here is appreciated.

Thanks
Click to expand...

They won't be intentionally looking thru anything. They don't have the time or interest; they work on hundreds of laptops every week, and it's just a routine for them, so I highly doubt any of them search through people's files.
 
If you're really that worried, take out the hard drive first before sending it to them. Then you put the drive in one of those USB hard drive enclosures, or use a tool such as this so you can get your files.

You could then put a newer, larger hard drive back in its place before sending it out to repair. If your crash was at all software related (or related to the HD) then you might have even fixed the problem.
 
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They aren't supposed to, but they could if they wanted to.

You could start your computer up in Firewire Target Disk Mode, and wipe the hard drive from another computer.
 
I never hand my computer over with a filled drive. Notebook or desktop, never going to happen. They're wreckless with computers.

alphaod said:
They're not suppose to.
Click to expand...

Not supposed to ... but they probably do.
 
As said before they shouldn't look, but might. Since no has has pointed out...there is a good chance they will reformat your drive.
 
SchneiderMan said:
But if he takes out his Hard drive, it could be the problems no?
Click to expand...
well yes if it is not replaced with another. ;) I took all my drives out and put in a 1tb with a fresh install of leopard on it. They ended up taking it out, handing it back to me, and put a new apple-issued drive in (which is boxed in my closet).
 
Staff often look through customers computers to copy music, movies, porn etc, geek squad even got busted doing it & numerous paedophiles have been caught by staff looking through the customers data.
 
I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I'm saying your blanket statements are a bit over-dramatic. I agree, though: always better to be safe. Whenever I take my computer in, I clone the hard drive to an external enclosure, run a secure wipe, and do a fresh install of OS X. That has the double benefit of securing my data and making troubleshooting easier for the techs.
 
Yeah, It's just the personal info I'm worried about handing over, not any crazy illegal stuff, but thanks for the information and advice.
 
Basically, they could if they wanted to.

If they were crooked, they could really cause some trouble with little effort (reading information, passwords, installing rootkits.)

Whenever I send a Mac in for repair, I do a 7 pass erase of the drive.
 
Make a Time Machine backup on an external and format the drive if you're that worried. Also, if it's a hardware repair just password protect the accounts on OS X and the repairers will stick another HDD in if they need to test stuff (this is what the guy at the Apple store told me).

Or PGP encrypt anything sensitive.
 
They're not any more likely to look at them than any PC repair place. In fact, they are probably less likely due to the volume of computers that they handle each and every day. If you have sensitive data that you'd like to give a little more protection to then you could put the drive in another computer and write 0's to it. That way it would be necessary to run data recovery software on the drive to get anything from it, which they surely would not do.
 
Bill Gates said:
They're not any more likely to look at them than any PC repair place. In fact, they are probably less likely due to the volume of computers that they handle each and every day. If you have sensitive data that you'd like to give a little more protection to then you could put the drive in another computer and write 0's to it. That way it would be necessary to run data recovery software on the drive to get anything from it, which they surely would not do.
Click to expand...

Problem with that is what if he has an Imac, which you can't get to the hard drive easily.
 
They wont(shouldn't)

When my cousin took in his iMac we tested this theory and the Finder's "recent items" were exactly the same as when we took it in.
 
I work in IT and when we get people who's computers we have to fix they always tell us all kinds of crazy rumors they hear such as "IT looks through your files and tells security!" and "IT reads all your emails and looks through all your pictures" or "IT puts viruses on your computer to get credit card numbers" etc. I've heard em all.


Truth is IT in any company, in your case the Apple Genius Bar, is most likely waaaaay too busy to look and could care less what you have on a computer. They've seen it all already. They just want to fix it and give it back and move on to the next person.
 
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