How secure is Disk Utility’s erase feature?

[danmart]

I am planning to sell my 2013 rMBP running the latest version of Catalina. It has previously been used for ’sensitive’ things like personal banking, photos, legal documents etc.

How secure is the erase feature from Disk Utilities? I have read conflicting information on how easy it is to use recovery tools to get things back from the drive after an erase.

For info, I have used File Vault on my machine. I think this provides a high degree of protection in this case since any recovered files would be encrypted?

Any input welcome!

 

[chrono1081]

It writes zeros to the hard drive and that's not recoverable. The only way you can get info from a drive like that (to my knowledge, someone correct me if I'm wrong) is if there are bad sectors that get skipped over. A disk check will tell you if there are sectors it can't write to.

 

[danmart]

Thanks for the reply. I had heard that this used to be the case, but that it stopped with SSDs due to their more limited lifespan compared to HDD. What do you think?

 

[RogerWilco6502]

If you're really concerned with security, you can use the secure erase feature that is (or at least used to be) included with Disk Utility

 

[chrfr]

I am planning to sell my 2013 rMBP running the latest version of Catalina. It has previously been used for ’sensitive’ things like personal banking, photos, legal documents etc.

How secure is the erase feature from Disk Utilities? I have read conflicting information on how easy it is to use recovery tools to get things back from the drive after an erase.

For info, I have used File Vault on my machine. I think this provides a high degree of protection in this case since any recovered files would be encrypted?

Any input welcome!

If everything was in FileVault then you have no concerns. Data will not be recoverable if you always used encryption and then erased the disk.

 

[danmart]

Thanks folks, that was my hope