Here are two methods to help you securely format USB flash drive/corrupted USB flash drive on macOS Monterey, you also can permanently erase data from the USB flash drive. How to Format USB Flash Drive on macOS Monterey? How to permanently delete files on Mac? How to permanently wipe data from Mac-based hard drive or external storage device? Here are three simple and reliable methods. Three Methods to Securely Erase Data on Mac How to permanently erase data on macOS Monterey? We will show you the best way to help you securely and permanently erase data on macOS Monterey to prevent potential data recovery. How to Permanently Erase Data on macOS Monterey? Then press the power button immediately and hold down the Control. Now, follow the steps to securely format or reformat external disk, memory card, USB drive and more on Mac Studio.įirst, you'll need to turn off your iMac device. How to Securely Format External Hard Drive/Memory Card/USB Flash Drive and Other Storage Device on Mac Studio?

So, without further ado, let's get started. Using the instructions in this article, we will show you how to reformat a Time Machine disk into a regular disk. Given an SSD, the 'erase'-ing of the free space is probably the best option, once the files have been deleted and removed from the trash.įor those with mechanical disks (non-SSD), the srm option may be the easiest alternative.How To Reformat A Time Machine Disk To An Ordinary Disk? It is important to bear in mind that with modern SSD wear levelling, writing to the same location in a file isn't necessarily going to write to the same location on the disk, hence the secure deletion would not always achieve what you wanted (see CVE-2015-5901 and hence removed in El Capitan).

Whilst this may not be the 'secure delete' you are looking for, it does skip the trash. The srm utility provides a mechanism (from at least Yosemite) to overwrite and remove files, lifehacker has an article on its use srm -v ~/Path/To/file.removeĬonsider using the 'Delete Immediately' option that was added to El Capitan. Where r is to recurse over the folders and P will overwrite their contents. Overwrite the contents before the deletion (from the terminal) rm -rP /path/to/file-or-folder You can consult the man page for more detail on the command usage.

In this command, change LEVEL to a number of 0 through 4, where 0 is a single-pass of zeros, 1 is a single-pass of random numbers, 2 is a 7-pass erase, 3 is a 35-pass erase, and 4 is a 3-pass erase (note all non single-pass options may take a while to complete). You can use the disk utility to overwrite the free space on the drive diskutil secureErase freespace LEVEL /Volumes/DRIVENAME The secure delete option was removed from El Capitan, but as explained in this article, there may be some alternatives you may wish to use (see below for notes if the Mac has an SSD).

How to securely erase mac osx yosemite