My preferred method is simpler, doesn’t require a reboot, and leaves OS X intact: (If you’re worried about someone reading your files, set it to erase securely.) This is kind of the atomic bomb of Mac formatting, because the next person to use the device will need to install OS X from scratch. Once you’ve booted into Recovery, you can open Disk Utility and erase your drive. At this point, your Mac is booting into the recovery partition. The quick and dirty way to wipe your entire hard drive is to reboot your Mac (after transferring all of your data elsewhere and logging out of iTunes, iMessage, and iCloud, of course!) and hold down Command-R until the Apple logo appears. If you’re running OS X Lion or later, your Mac almost certainly has a special disk partition called OS X Recovery. There are plenty of ways to wipe your drive. After a week or two with most of those products, they go back in the box and are sent back to Apple… ideally without any of my personal data still residing on them. This is a challenge I face a lot, too, as a frequent reviewer of Apple hardware. The company was shipping him a new MacBook, and he didn’t want to send the old one back with email and other personal data intact.

Note: This story has not been updated since 2020.Ī friend of mine emailed me the other day to ask how he could wipe the data off of his MacBook before sending it back to his employer.

How to get to user folder on mac