This is a good way of ensuring that you won’t lose anything when you wipe your Mac’s hard drive. When you clone your hard drive, not only are you copying all its application and user files, but you’re also copying the entire operating system, essentially creating a perfect copy of your Mac that you can access at any time. However, if you have lots of content that you want to hang onto, then it may be easier to simply clone the entire contents of your hard drive to an external drive. If you only need to backup a handful of items, then you may want to just move this content to an external storage device, such as a USB stick, or copy it to an online hosting service such as DropBox, iCloud or Google Docs. I’ll show you how to remove all your login information, deauthorise your iTunes and, finally, how to restore factory settings by wiping your hard drive and installing a fresh copy of macOS.īefore you remove anything from your Mac, you’ll need to make sure you’ve backed up all the files, documents and any other content you want to keep.

In this article, I’m going to show you how to revert your Mac to a pristine, fresh-out-the-box state. Maybe your Mac is clogged with years’ of content and you’ve decided it’ll be far easier to just start from scratch rather than trying to sort this mess out manually or perhaps you’ve tried to customise your Mac and it’s gone terribly wrong, and you need a quick way of restoring its original settings.

Regardless of whether you’re gifting or selling your Mac, no one’s going to be thrilled to find that their new computer is packed with someone else’s content and data, and you definitely don’t want to sell your Mac to a stranger while it’s still logged into your iCloud account – or even worse, your PayPal!Įven if you’re not planning on getting rid of your Mac, there may still be times when you want to wipe your computer. Thinking of selling your Mac? Or maybe you’re planning to do a good deed and pass your old Mac along to a friend or family member?

How to clean up mac before selling