Hello,

This is my first post on the forum, its can probably be filed under 'absolute noob' but here goes...

I have a 1tb WD External HHD which I don't need any more and am looking to sell. My question is simple, how good is the data erase in the mac disk utility. If I sell it, I want it to be really clean.... 0% chance of data recovery. Not that I have much to hide, but my data is my data, would not want 'ibiza 08 with the lads' suddenly surfacing on the tinterwebs haha

The settings I used were.... Format: Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and Security: The first level of the security options, 'Zero Out Data'.

It formatted with no errors and the disk appears to be totally empty again.

Is this enough? If I run it through disk utility again and erase with the same settings, does this double the effectiveness or is that a waste of time? Was 'Mac OS Extended' the best format to use?

Thanks for any info!

Cheers,

Brian

"Zero out data" should be plenty good enough, assuming that's what it actually did.

Did it take several hours to compete the erase?

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PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

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Yes.. it took 7 hours.

Should be good enough

If you wanna be sure and for peace of mind, download a demo of some recovery software (e.g. RStudio) and run it through the drive. It should find absolutely nothing.

_________________
PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!

Thank you for the info pcimage!

Yes, MacOS secure format is all you need.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

agree, but you will wonder anyways, so I recommend doing what pcimage said anyway.

FWIW I buy a LOT of flash memory on ebay. I always run DR software just to see...

ohhh Haque after years working in datarecovery i realized that most of the times you don't want to know what's inside hahahaha.

It's generally considered impossible to recover data that has been zero'd once.

Some shredders/erasers offer 'multiple' passes, this is for extremely paranoid people, i don't think multiple passes is necessary at all but people can do as they wish.