Get stuff off Macbook in order to sell machine...
October 9, 2010 8:01 AM
I'm selling my Macbook tomorrow (Snow Leopard). What's the best way for me to get everything off of it and then delete that stuff so the new owner has as clean a slate as possible. Do I just plug in a drive and turn on Time Machine? (Does that copy my software and everything else?) I'd prefer to get it off in such a way that I don't have to make my new Macbook Air be a mirror of that old machine--I'd like to pick and choose what I put on it and leave the rest backed up on the external hd.
I don't believe I have the install discs any more so can't just reinstall the OS. Thank you!
Time Machine will certainly work, but I would use SuperDuper! to copy your MacBook onto an external hard drive (or a disk image), and then pick and choose what you want to keep later. (I find it easier to sift through the information when you copy it over this way.)
Then, go into System Preferences and create a new user account for your buyer. Make it an administrator. Delete your own user account (when prompted, tell the computer you really want to delete your user account). Go through your hard drive and see if there's anything else you really want to delete. Do so.
Then, go into Utilities > Disk Utility, select your hard drive, click the "Erase" tab, click the "Erase Free Space" button and send it through at least a 7-pass erase. That will securely and permanently remove all the stuff you deleted in the previous step, and all the other stuff you've deleted over time.
(If you find a couple stragglers when you're done with all of this, use "Secure Empty Trash" in the Finder window to permanently delete those files.)
posted by thejoshu at 8:35 AM on October 9, 2010
Then, go into System Preferences and create a new user account for your buyer. Make it an administrator. Delete your own user account (when prompted, tell the computer you really want to delete your user account). Go through your hard drive and see if there's anything else you really want to delete. Do so.
Then, go into Utilities > Disk Utility, select your hard drive, click the "Erase" tab, click the "Erase Free Space" button and send it through at least a 7-pass erase. That will securely and permanently remove all the stuff you deleted in the previous step, and all the other stuff you've deleted over time.
(If you find a couple stragglers when you're done with all of this, use "Secure Empty Trash" in the Finder window to permanently delete those files.)
posted by thejoshu at 8:35 AM on October 9, 2010
Copy everything you want out of your current account, assuming that the work we do a little further on means that anything you don't save will be 100% irrevocably gone. Save it wherever you want - external drive, other macbook, whatever, but double-check to make sure anything really important is there.
Then, and do _not_ proceed past this line without having everything that you want to keep saved to your external hard drive because it will be, I say again, irrevocably, irretrievably gone:
- Create a new user account on that computer with some simple dummy password you can give to the new owner.
- Log out of yours, and log into the new one. Delete your old account. It will ask you if you want to keep the old files and delete just the login, or to delete everything. Delete everything.
That should, in theory, be enough. If you're particularly paranoid, do the following:
- When logged into your new account, open Terminal.
- Type in " dd if=/dev/urandom of=largefile bs=1M " and hit enter. Let it run until it stops, which may take quite a while. It will stop when it runs completely out of disk space. Then type in " rm largefile " and hit enter.
When you delete a file, the actual contents of the file don't get deleted - the filesystem just says "there's no file on that spot on the hard drive now", but it doesn't actually zero the contents of it; common tools can be used to recover those spaces, and the information in them, if they don't get re-used by the OS for anything else. That "dd..." command reuses all the unallocated space on the hard drive, including all that space you've just freed up by deleting your old account, by filling it with randomly-generated noise. Then you just delete the file, freeing the now-randomized space up again, and off you go.
Then give it to somebody, because it will have the OS and the apps still on it, but your personal data will be gone.
posted by mhoye at 8:39 AM on October 9, 2010
Then, and do _not_ proceed past this line without having everything that you want to keep saved to your external hard drive because it will be, I say again, irrevocably, irretrievably gone:
- Create a new user account on that computer with some simple dummy password you can give to the new owner.
- Log out of yours, and log into the new one. Delete your old account. It will ask you if you want to keep the old files and delete just the login, or to delete everything. Delete everything.
That should, in theory, be enough. If you're particularly paranoid, do the following:
- When logged into your new account, open Terminal.
- Type in " dd if=/dev/urandom of=largefile bs=1M " and hit enter. Let it run until it stops, which may take quite a while. It will stop when it runs completely out of disk space. Then type in " rm largefile " and hit enter.
When you delete a file, the actual contents of the file don't get deleted - the filesystem just says "there's no file on that spot on the hard drive now", but it doesn't actually zero the contents of it; common tools can be used to recover those spaces, and the information in them, if they don't get re-used by the OS for anything else. That "dd..." command reuses all the unallocated space on the hard drive, including all that space you've just freed up by deleting your old account, by filling it with randomly-generated noise. Then you just delete the file, freeing the now-randomized space up again, and off you go.
Then give it to somebody, because it will have the OS and the apps still on it, but your personal data will be gone.
posted by mhoye at 8:39 AM on October 9, 2010
Thanks everyone!
it will have the OS and the apps still on it
So if I want to get rid of apps I just drag them to the trash individually?
posted by dobbs at 8:47 AM on October 9, 2010
it will have the OS and the apps still on it
So if I want to get rid of apps I just drag them to the trash individually?
posted by dobbs at 8:47 AM on October 9, 2010
When you delete a file, the actual contents of the file don't get deleted - the filesystem just says "there's no file on that spot on the hard drive now", but it doesn't actually zero the contents of it; common tools can be used to recover those spaces, and the information in them, if they don't get re-used by the OS for anything else. That "dd..." command reuses all the unallocated space on the hard drive, including all that space you've just freed up by deleting your old account, by filling it with randomly-generated noise. Then you just delete the file, freeing the now-randomized space up again, and off you go.
If the thought of the command line makes you nervous, you can also manually drop the old home directory into the trash and use the built-in secure empty trash feature.
posted by rbs at 9:25 AM on October 9, 2010
So if I want to get rid of apps I just drag them to the trash individually?
I would use something like AppZapper to delete all associated files as well.
posted by ddaavviidd at 11:46 AM on October 9, 2010
I would use something like AppZapper to delete all associated files as well.
posted by ddaavviidd at 11:46 AM on October 9, 2010
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by Biru at 8:25 AM on October 9, 2010