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There are different levels of Secure Erase that increase the number of passes Disk Utility will make when writing new data to the drive. This overwrites the entire drive and makes data recovery efforts much more difficult. But if you use the Secure Erase feature, it will actually go through the drive sector-by-sector and write data to every part.
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Securely Erasing Your DrivesĪ way to protect yourself from having this sensitive information exposed is to use a feature called “Secure Erase.” Normally, when you use Disk Utility to erase a drive, it essentially wipes out the drive’s “table of contents” from our example earlier. This means that files you thought were gone may still be lurking on your hard drive, including tax and financial records, confidential businesses or medical information, and even things like private photographs. Unless that happens, however, those bits of data from the original file will still be on your hard drive, and may be accessible via special data recovery applications or, in more serious cases, physical analysis of the drive’s internal platters themselves.
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Therefore, if you delete a bunch a files and then load your Mac up with new data, there’s a good chance that your new data will need the space occupied by your deleted file and then overwrite it. It simply says “hey, this page is no longer needed, so go ahead and write new information on it when necessary.” When you delete a file, including when you Empty the Trash, your Mac essentially erases the file’s entry in the index, but doesn’t go and erase the page in the book on which the information was stored. The index tells you (the computer) exactly which page to turn to when you need a specific piece of information, but the information itself exist only on that page. Here’s a good analogy: think of your Mac’s hard drive as a book with a table of contents or index.