You may choose from Zero out Deleted Files,3-Pass Erase, 7-Pass Erase or 35-Pass Erase of Deleted Files. In the right-hand pane, choose Erase Free Space.Macintosh HD) in the left-hand pane of the Disk Utility window.

Select the name of your hard drive (e.g.

Launch the Disk Utility Application, from Applications/Utilities on your hard drive.

However, Apple does have a service that can be used to ensure that deleted files are not recoverable, which is to secure erase the entire free space on a drive. The security empty trash option will only work if you have existing files, it you cannot be used on an already deleted file. This may take some time, depending on how large the files are.

From the Finder menu, select Secure Empty Trash.

Move the files into your trash (at the end of the Dock).

Keep in mind that this process will take far longer to do than a basic deletion, and its time frame will depend on the file size.įor instance, if you secure-delete a small text document, it will be done in split seconds, whereas, if you do so for a 2GB movie file, it will take number of seconds to completely erase the file. This will perform a multipass overwrite of the file’s contents with random data before the system finally removes the file. If your file is still available, then the first option is to secure-delete it using the Secure Empty Trash option in the Finder.

If you have sensitive data on your machine and need to delete it securely, there are two methods to use: Secure Empty Trash You will NOT be able to recover them afterwards. Note: The following methods will PERMANENTLY delete the files in your trash and other files you have previously deleted. However, Apple does offer a few approaches for removing the residual data from a file that you are going to delete, or which has already been deleted. This means that if you store an important document on an external hard drive and then decide to delete the file, its contents will still be on the drive and may be recoverable. However, during this logically deletes the file, on conventional hard drives the data structure of the file is still intact and with special file-recovery software can be read through and potentially recovered. When you delete files in OS X, by default the system will simply remove the file’s entry from the drive’s index, which simply allocates the space used by the file as free for other uses.

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