Factory reset a MacBook or iMac in the right order — files first, wipe second

The order matters more than the buttons

Every bad reset story follows the same pattern: the wipe itself went fine, but something wasn't saved first. A factory reset returns the Mac to the state it left the factory in, so files, photos, applications and accounts are all gone, and there's no partial version on offer. Step one, then, has nothing to do with resetting. Copy what you value to an external drive, let Time Machine run to completion, or check that iCloud has actually finished syncing rather than just promising to (an 'Uploading…' that never clears means it hasn't yet). On current Macs the storage is encrypted and soldered to the board, which turns 'forgot to back up' into a permanent situation.

Step two is separating the Mac from your Apple identity. Turn off Find My Mac under your name in the iCloud section of System Settings; doing this also releases Activation Lock, the barrier that would otherwise stop the next owner. Sign out of iMessage from within Messages, and in the Music and TV apps remove this computer's authorisation so the slot goes back to your account.

Modern Macs: the built-in full wipe

Any Apple Silicon Mac (the M-chip generations of Air and Pro, plus the iMac, Mac mini and Mac Studio desktops) and any Intel model with the T2 chip, running Monterey or later, keeps the whole procedure behind a single control: Erase All Content and Settings. You'll find it in System Settings under General, in the Transfer or Reset panel (Monterey puts it under the System Preferences menu instead). Enter your password, let the sign-outs run, then confirm.

Notice how quickly it finishes. Nothing is being scrubbed sector by sector; the disk was encrypted from the start, and the reset simply destroys the keys, leaving every existing byte as permanent noise, then installs a clean copy of macOS and restarts at the setup screen. This is the method Apple intends for resale and hand-me-downs, and for owners of modern Macs it's the only wipe they'll ever need to run.

Older Intel Macs: Recovery Mode by hand

An Intel Mac without the T2 has no single switch, so the wipe is done by hand through Recovery Mode: shut down, power on while holding Command-R, and let go when the Apple logo appears. (On Apple Silicon the equivalent is holding the power button until the startup options load, then choosing Options; that's useful for repairs, though the one-button erase described above is still the better wipe.) You'll end up in the macOS Utilities window.

Once inside, start with Disk Utility: select the internal disk, usually called Macintosh HD, choose Erase and format it as APFS on any recent system. Then quit and run Reinstall macOS onto the empty disk. If you came here because of a flashing question-mark folder at startup, that symbol means no startup system could be found. Recovery Mode is where you either fix it with a clean install or, if the disk holds anything you want, where you stop and have the drive imaged before going anywhere near Erase.

What a reset destroys — and whether it destroys enough

Two mirror-image questions come up about how secure a reset is. The first: is it thorough? On encrypted storage (all Apple Silicon and T2 machines, plus any older Mac with FileVault switched on), yes. Destroying the key is absolute, and nobody can reconstruct the contents afterwards. The exception is an older Intel Mac with a spinning hard drive and FileVault off, where a standard erase clears the catalogue but leaves the data physically present for forensic tools to read. Before selling a Mac like that, turn FileVault on first, or use a full overwrite erase rather than the quick one.

Then the mirror question: can anything be recovered afterwards? A modern reset is designed so that the answer is no. There's no recovery partition holding your files, no bin that survives and nothing left for a lab to read. Whatever wasn't backed up before an Erase All Content run is gone as a matter of cryptography, which is why this guide runs in the order it does.

When it stops being a reset problem

A Mac that's already been wiped by mistake, or one that won't boot when it's the files you're after, is a data recovery job, and the odds differ sharply between the two. Machines that won't boot but have healthy storage routinely recover well. Modern Macs that have genuinely been erased don't; the cryptography described above cuts both ways. Whichever applies, stop using the machine now, because every new write lands on space your files might occupy.

Our Apple bench work is set out on the MacBook data recovery and iMac data recovery pages, and pricing is explained honestly at what data recovery costs. One limit, stated at the outset: we work on Mac storage that can be removed (hard drives and blade SSDs), not on chips soldered to the logic board, which is what T2 and Apple Silicon machines have. On those Macs, a backup habit isn't just good advice; it's the whole safety net. Stuck right now? The free online diagnostic will give you a straight answer.