Site TIPS PAGE🔎   UP ONE LEVEL
 OJB's Web Site. V 2.1.tip tips mac owen2 
Tip

Up to OJB's Mac Tips List

Secure Erase from El Capitan

The secure erase free space feature has been removed form Disk Utility in El Capitan (10.11) and later because it isn't useful for SSDs. It can still be accessed from the command line, like this...

diskutil secureErase freespace

Where "level" is a number from 0­ to 4 indicating the type of erasing to do...
0 – Single­ pass zero­fill erase.
1 – Single­ pass random­fill erase.
2 – US DoD 7­pass secure erase.
3 – Gutmann algorithm 35­ pass secure erase.
4 – US DoE algorithm 3­ pass secure erase.

And "drivename" is the path to the drive, like /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD. Note the escaping of the space in the drive name above. You can see the mounted disks using the distil list command.

IMPORTANT: don't forget the "freespace" option to make sure the whole disk isn't erased!



My latest blog post: Avoid Microsoft: If you don't really like computers much you could make things a bit better for yourself. (posted 2024-12-04). My latest podcast: OJB's Podcast 2024-11-18 Unity Through Division.
 ©2024 by OJBServerMacs are BestMac Made
T: 11. H: 193,390,853
Features: RSS Feeds Feedback LogMod: 07 Jun 2024