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The good news is that the fastest security option is selected by default.
Most Secure: This option meets the US Department of Defense 5220-22 M standard for security erasing magnetic media because it writes over the data 7 times. Secure: This option is a DOE-compliant 3-pass secure erase, and it writes two passes of random data followed by a single pass of known data over the entire drive. Fast: This option writes a pass of random data and then a single pass of zeros over the entire drive. A hard drive recovery software may be able to recover the files. Fastest: This option does not securely erase the files on the drive. These options specify how to erase the selected drive to prevent hard drive recovery software from recovering it.Īs a Mac user, you can choose between the following security options: But even though erasing the wrong internal or external hard drive seems like a pretty clear-cut problem to tackle, the truth is that some erased hard drives can be recovered using hard drive recovery software, while others can only be restored from a backup.Įven though Disk Utility always erases everything on the hard drive, it doesn’t always overwrite the erased data, making their recovery impossible. In fact, you’re guaranteed to come across at least one or two almost every day if you frequent popular Mac forums. Sadly, posts like this one are far from rare. I wanted to wipe the bigger drive completely, so I utilized the disk utility erase feature,” writes u/Jeffooie on Reddit.” Long story short, I wanted to move some old movies I had in a smaller drive to a bigger drive that was empty. “Being the idiot that I am, I accidentally wiped an external drive (Seagate Backup Plus Slim 1.5 TB) using Disk Utility in OSX. Does Disk Utility Erase Everything on the Hard Drive? The goal of this article is to help Mac users recover erased data in the quickest and most cost-effective manner possible, which is why we describe two different solutions, each suitable for a slightly different data loss scenario.
Why? Because there’s a lot of misinformation online when it comes to data recovery solutions for Mac. Have you accidentally erased a hard drive using Disk Utility on Mac and are wondering if you can recover it? You’re not the only one! Every day, thousands of users around the world search for solutions that would let them recover an erased hard drive on Mac, but only a few find what they’re looking for.