There are mainly two reasons why you want to restore your Mac to factory settings and erase everything.
Click the Review Files button, then choose any of the file categories in the sidebar, such as Applications, Documents, GarageBand, iOS Files, iTunes, or Trash. Some categories allow you delete files directly. (If you purchased the file from the Mac App Store, iBooks Store, or iTunes Store, you might be able to download it again.) Other categories show the total storage space used by the files in each app. These temporary files are needed when execute any program and after execution, these are useless. Therefore, you should delete these temp files from you MacBook Pro to free up hard drive space. You can manually clean junk files on MacBook Pro by following these steps: Go to Finder and click on Applications option then Utilities.
- You want to erase your MacBook Pro/Air, MacBook, iMac to sell or give away the Mac.
- Your Mac is running slow or having other problems so that you want to delete everything on Mac to start over.
It is not difficult to erase everything on a Mac and reformat the MacBook or iMac. But if you want to reset MacBook Pro/Air, iMac without losing data, or securely and completely wipe a Mac, there are a couple of things you should do. Just follow this guide to complete all the steps that are needed to securely and completely erase everything on Mac. Your Mac will be restored to factory settings after that.
Step 1: Back Up Your Mac Before Factory Reset
I believe that there must be some important files on your Mac. Therefore, it is a must to back up your files before erasing your MacBook or iMac. There are mutiple options to back up your Mac:
Move everything that are important to you to an external hard drive. It is time-consuming but feasible if you have limited documents, photos, videos, etc. that need to be backed up before erasing Mac.
Back up your files on Mac to a cloud storage, such as iCloud. Before doing that, make sure your iCloud account have enough free space.
Make a copy of your Mac data to an external hard drive with a backup program, such as Time Machine, Apple's built-in backup tool for Mac. Learn about the steps to back up a Mac: How to Backup Your Mac with or without Time Machine.
You can wipe a Mac without losing data by using one of the backup methods mentioned above. And to reduce the size of your Mac's backup and incease the backup speed, it is recommended to clean useless junk files on your Mac before a Time Machine or iCloud backup. FonePaw MacMaster can easily delete caches, logs, borwsing history, duplicate files and photos, large files, useless apps and more from your Mac.
Download
- Download and run FonePaw MacMaster on your Mac.
- Select the file type you want to clean, such as system junks, duplicate photos. Click Scan.
- Click Clean to remove the junks you don't need.
Go ahead to back up your Mac. The backup will be finished more quickly, taking less space of your external hard drive or iCloud account.
Step 2: Completely Delete Private Files
Do you know that files on Mac are actually recoverable after factory reset? That's right. Even though you have reformatted your Mac and erased everything on Mac, it is still possible to recover the erased files on the Mac with a professional data recovery program such as FonePaw Data Recovery. If you have confidential files on your Mac and don't want to take the risk that somebody may find the files from the reformatted Mac after performing data recovery, you can use Eraser on FonePaw MacMasterto securely delete confidential files on your Mac before factory reset. The Eraser can erase the trace of a file on the hard drive and make it unrecoverable.
- Install FonePaw MacMaster on your Mac.
- Click Eraser and select the files you want to destroy.
- Click Erase to make it unrecoverable.
Step 3: Turn off FileVault
FileVault encryption is an Apple built-in feature that is designed to encrypt your hard drive and files on the hard drive. It is recommended to turn off FileVault before reset and clean install macOS system. Here are the stpes to disable FileVault encryption.
- Open System Preferences > Security & Privacy.
- On the Security & Privacy window, click the FileVault tab.
- Click Lock button and you will need to enter password of the administrator account the unlock FileVault settings.
- After entering the password, you are able to click Turn Off FileVault. Click it.
All files on your Mac will be dencrypted after FileVault is off.
Step 4: Remove iTunes Authorization and iCloud Account
You don't want your iTunes or iCloud account to be linking to your MacBook or iMac if you decide to sell it or give it away. You can authorize only 5 computer with your iTunes account so you don't want to lose an allocation to a Mac that you no longer own. So before erasing your MacBook or iMac, you should first deauthorize iTunes and disable iCloud on your Mac.
Deauthorize iTunes on Mac
- Open iTunes on Mac. Click Account > Authorizations > Deauthorize This Computer.
- You'll need to enter the password of your Apple ID. Then click Deauthorize.
Sign out of iCloud on Mac
- Open System Preference > iCloud. Click Sign Out. A window will pop up, asking whether you want to keep a copy of your iCloud data on the Mac.
- Deselect all the options and click Continue, which will ensure that your iCloud data won't stay on the Mac.
Also, don't forget that your iCloud account can also be used to receive iMessage. So run Messages, click Preferences > Accounts to sign out of iMessage.
Step 5: Erase MacBook, MacBook Air/Pro, iMac
After finishing the above steps, you are now offically able to wipe your MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air or iMac. You need to erase your Mac in recovery mode.
Enter your Mac into recovery mode
Power off your Mac and then reboot it. As it is rebooting, press and hold Command + R (Option + Command + R or Shift + Option + Command + R) until you see the Apple logo.
Generally you can use Command + R combination to enter the Recovery mode. If you need to upgrade you need to the latest macOS compatible with your Mac, use Option + Command + R; If you want to clean install the macOS that came with your Mac, use Shift + Option + Command + R.
Erase everything on your Mac
When you are in recovery mode on Mac, you will see the macOS Utilities menu. Select Disk Utility.
Select the disk to erase. To erase everything on your Mac, you usually should choose the main hard drive named Macintosh HD.
If the Mac is running High Sierra or later, Disk Utility will show all the Macs linked with your Apple ID under Macintosh HD. So be careful not to delete the drive of other Macs.
Click Erase. Then you need to enter name and format of the drive. You can choose either APFS or Mac OS Extended (journaled) to reformat the Mac. APFS is a new file system introduced by Apple since High Sierra, which is more recommendable. Click Erase to begin wiping everything on your Mac.
Step 6: Reinstall macOS on MacBook, iMac
After deleting everything on your Mac, you can now reinstall macOS. Go back to macOS Utilities menu. Select Reinstall macOS and follow the on-screen instructions to finish.
That's all about how to factory reset your Mac and erase everthing. If you have more question, drop it in the comment section.
MacMaster
Deleting Duplicate Files On Macbook Pro
Securely clean up the junk files, big files, unneeded files on your Mac to speed it up.
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Apple's built-in backup program for the Mac, Time Machine, makes it incredibly easy to back up all of your important data so you can restore your computer if something should happen. You can even recover deleted files if you accidentally lose them.
On Apple laptops, like the MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro, Time Machine includes the added feature of creating local snapshots so that, if you disconnect your MacBook from its external hard drive, you'll still have backups stored on your internal hard drive so you can recover data if you need to.
Local snapshots are invaluable for certain situations when you're out and about and need to recover data but don't have your backup hard drive. They also, eventually, start taking up noticeable space on your hard drive.
Why do I have 100 GB of backups on my hard drive?
You need an external hard drive in order to set up and use Time Machine because that's where your backups are stored. So why do you have a large number of backups taking up space on your MacBook's internal hard drive? Because local snapshots.
As soon as you set up Time Machine on your Mac laptop, local snapshots are created automatically. Time Machine makes one daily snapshot every 24 hours when you start up your MacBook and also stores weekly snapshots. It keeps those weekly snapshots on your internal hard drive until you start to get low on storage. So, if you've been backing up your Mac for years with Time Machine, you could potentially have 100 GB of backups stored in your internal hard drive, as long as you have space for them.
How do I get rid of all these backups?
First, let me preface this by saying that you shouldn't worry about those backups and all the space they are taking up. If everything is working properly, Time Machine will automatically delete the oldest snapshot backups as soon as your internal hard drive has less than 20% of storage space left. If you then, say, download some large program and your internal hard drive plummets to below 10% (or less than 5GB of internal storage), Time Machine will delete all local snapshots except the most recent. The program will then continue to replace the old snapshot with a new one until you free up space on your Mac's internal storage, at which point it will go back to saving weekly snapshots as long as space permits.
That being said, everything doesn't always work properly and you may find yourself out of storage space on your internal hard drive, and those snapshot backups just won't go away. If you really need to delete those snapshots (which I don't recommend unless you desperately need that space), there is a way to purge local snapshots from your internal hard drive. You can use a Terminal command that will disable Time Machine's local snapshot feature, which will delete all of the local snapshots on your internal hard drive. It will also stop Time Machine from creating new snapshots.
To disable local snapshots in Time Machine and remove them from your internal storage:
- Launch Terminal on your Mac laptop.
- Enter the following command into Terminal.sudo tmutil disablelocal
- Press Enter.
Delete Files On Macbook Pro
This will remove those local snapshots from your internal storage. You can then re-enable the feature, which I highly recommend.
- Open Terminal on your Mac laptop.
- Enter the following command into Terminal:sudo tmutil enablelocal
- Press Enter.
Time Machine will start over, saving local snapshots to your Mac laptop's internal storage.
Any questions?
Delete Other Files On Macbook Pro
Before you decide to purge your local snapshots, be sure you really need to do this. Time Machine should work automatically to remove older backups as you need the storage space on your internal hard drive. If you delete old backups, you can never retrieve data from them if something were to go wrong while you aren't connected to your backup hard drive. If you have any questions about local snapshots, drop them in the comments and I'll help you out.
Updated October 2018: Updated for macOS Mojave.