How To Prepare A Mac For Sale Or A Return To An Employer

When you need to give up or sell a Mac, how can you make sure you keep what you need and leave a wiped machine?

- Glenn Fleishman

When it’s time to give up a Mac, you typically don’t want to give up its secrets—your private and personal data—when it goes. This can be at the time you sell it, or, in the case of Macworld reader Dane, when you leave a job and you need to return the Mac to your employer. (You might be asked to return a computer even while you keep a job, too, of course.)

Not preparing a computer before you return it can sometimes have consequences. A friend returned a work machine and was eventually paid a visit by police. His previous employer had examined the web history of the computer returned, and found a set of searches about news and travel they decided were suspicious but that had been conducted innocently and separately by different members of the household.

PREPARE A MAC FOR SALE

If it’s your own computer, here are the easiest set of steps you can take to prep the machine.

> Make a clone via SuperDuper! (go. macworld.com/spdp), Carbon Copy Cloner (go.macworld.com/cbcl), or Disk Utility (while booted into macOS Recovery [go. macworld.com/mrec]), or choose to start a Time Machine backup to make sure you have all the latest data. You can then migrate it to a new Mac, or keep it on hand for later retrieval.

> If you have a firmware password set (go.macworld.com/fmps), remove it.

> Boot into macOS Recovery and erase the drive via Disk Utility, then reinstall the latest version of macOS the computer can handle. (See “More on Erasure,” below.)