Paragon Disk Wiper for Mac allows to create a bootable USB-flash drive or external hard drive that will help you to completely erase a whole hard disk, a separate partition or just clean free space. After booting your Mac with the bootable media you will be able to use Wipe Wizard to irreversibly remove your confidential data. What the “Erase Free Space” feature did (and still does in prior versions of Mac OS X) was overwrite the free space on a drive to prevent file recovery, adding a layer of security and privacy to file removal, much in the way that Secure Empty Trash performed a similar function of overwriting data after removal. When you run it on your Mac, you will see three data erasure options: Erase Files, Erase Hard Drive, Erase Free Space. If you want to erase a hard drive in OS X 10.9 Mavericks, just choose the option – ' Erase Hard Drive '. Then select the hard drive and click on 'Erase' button. Once the erasing process gets finished, all the data on the.

When deleting a file, most operating systems just delete the reference to this file, not its actual content. For illustration, that’s like removing a chapter from a book’s table of contents without actually removing (and shredding) the according pages in the book.

So, in order to really (securely) delete a file on a hard disk, there are basically two methods (simplified; from a technical point of view it’s both the same):

• Overwrite the file content (i.e. its clusters) with random data
• Delete the file as usual, empty the trash and overwrite the whole free space on the according hard disk with random data

For the second method, here’s how to do it using Mac OS X:

1. Delete the file(s) and empty the trash
2. Find out the device name of the according hard disk by opening a new ‘Terminal’ window and executing the “df” command. For example, for a RAID 1 disk, the path of the disk might be something like “/dev/disk2”
3. In the opened ‘Terminal’ window, execute:
   diskutil secureErase freespace 1 /dev/disk2
   where “1” stands for “single-pass random-fill erase” and “/dev/disk2” is the disk device (adjust this to match your disk). When prompted, enter the admin’s credentials.

Mac Os X Erase Free Space Windows 7

How To Free Up Space On Mac

Note that overwriting free space like this takes quite some time depending on the amount of free space there is and how many passes you need (e.g. use “2” for a US DoD 7-pass secure erase or “3” for a Gutmann 35-pass secure erase). For more information about diskutil and its options, see “man diskutils”.