What should I do to my Mac before I sell it or give it away now that it is full of my important data and information? If you are asking yourself this question, then you are on the right path and this article is yours. We will show you how things are done and if you are thinking of selling your Mac instead of giving it away, you can sell it at this site.
Recycling of fantastic and if you are thinking of selling or giving away your old Mac as a gift you are doing the right thing. But before you reach that stage of selling it or giving it away, there are some tasks to be done first.
Before you sell or give away your Mac to a friend or a family member, you should ensure not to lose your data and information. Transfer all your documents, files, photos, applications and any other important information to a safe place, deactivate all Apple serves, clean your Mac by formatting/erasing the hard drive and reinstalling a new operating system. Cleaning should be done both inside and outside the body.
In this post, we are going to list down some steps to take before you sell, donate or give away your Mac. But before we head there, we should let you know something.
Do you know that whenever you delete a document, a file, an app or a photo it has not gone forever? Now you know. Sometimes when we delete things from our computers we think that it’s all, no one can access such things, but it’s possible to recover the deleted information. There are other sophisticated recovery tools that can be used to recover your deleted data so it good to wipe your Mac completely after you have backed up and followed the steps we are about to highlight.
Let’s get started!
- Back up all your data and information
You do not want to hit the format button to realize later that all your data and information is still intact in your Mac so, the first step is to back up your data and information. You may back up data by transferring them to your new Mac or an external hard drive.
If you intend to transfer your data to your new Mac you can use Migration Assistant. Read here to know how to transfer files from one Mac to another.To back up data you can use the Time Machine or iCloud, check here to know how the back process goes.
- Deactivate Apple services
Apple services are iTunes, iCloud and iMessage. All these services are registered with your personal information and so it is good to sign out on all of them so that the person buying or the one you are giving your Mac does not access these services under your name.
- Erase and reformat your hard drive and reinstall macOS
Now that you have deactivated all the Apple services, it’s time to get into the real process. The formatting or erasing process is aimed at ensuring your Mac is restored to factory settings. This means it will be empty with no files no anything. See how to format Mac hard drive.
Once you have formatted your Mac hard drive, reinstall your new operating system and your MacBook is ready to sell or give away.