Factory resetting a Mac in the right order — save everything first, wipe once

The order matters more than the buttons

Every single sad story about resetting a computer has exactly one thing in common: the "wipe" was completed flawlessly and something had simply not been backed up prior to the wipe. A complete reset will remove everything from your Mac: files, photos, programs, account information etc., and there is no partial option or waiting period once you make this irreversible decision. Therefore, step one is not about resetting; it is to back up everything important to an external drive, let a Time Machine backup run right to the end, or verify that iCloud has actually finished syncing rather than just meaning to (an "Uploading..." that never resolves means it hasn't). We see this failure mode every summer as students at Heslington in York sell off their MacBooks, and some of them have wiped their machines clean for the new owner without saving their dissertations anywhere other than the MacBook. On a modern Mac that mistake has no appeal process, for reasons explained below.

Step two is to separate the Mac from your Apple ID. Turn off Find My Mac (in System Settings, under your name), which also releases Activation Lock, the barrier that would otherwise greet the buyer like a bailiff. Sign out of iMessage from within the Messages app and deauthorise the Mac in the Music and TV apps, so an empty licence slot is returned to your account.

Modern Macs: one switch does the lot

The process is completely controlled by Erase All Content and Settings on an Apple Silicon Mac (the M-series MacBooks, iMac, Mac mini, Mac Studio) or any Intel machine with the T2 chip that is running Monterey or later. You'll find it in System Settings under General, in the Transfer or Reset panel. Enter your password, let the sign-outs run, confirm you want to do it, and then it's done.

Note how fast this process is completed, because the speed is the security. No sectors are being erased, as the entire SSD was already encrypted from its first day; the reset destroys the encryption keys, making all existing data on the device permanently unreadable, random noise, and then writes a fresh copy of macOS and boots back up to the "hello" screen. This is the method that Apple created to allow you to resell or pass your old Mac on to someone else, and on a modern Mac it is the only wipe that ever needs running.

Older Intel Macs: Recovery Mode, by hand

An Intel Mac that does not have a T2 has no single switch, so it will be wiped manually in Recovery Mode. To enter Recovery Mode, shut your machine off, then turn it back on holding Command-R, let go when the Apple logo shows up, and the macOS Utilities window appears. On an Apple Silicon machine the equivalent is holding the power button until the startup options load, which can be very helpful when attempting a repair; however, the one-button erase described above remains the better wipe on those machines.

First, with Disk Utility, select the internal disk (usually named Macintosh HD), choose "Erase", and use APFS as the format on anything recent. Quit, and then run Reinstall macOS to write the operating system onto the empty disk. And if you got into Recovery because of a flashing question-mark folder at startup, this is because your Mac was unable to find a system to boot, and it has presented you with a choice. If the disk holds nothing you want, a clean install will solve this problem. If there is something valuable on the drive, stop: the drive gets imaged before anyone touches Erase. Erase last.

What a reset destroys — and whether that's enough

Sellers ask mirror-image questions about reset security. Is it thorough? Apple Silicon machines (M1, M2 etc.) and T2 Macs, plus any older Mac that has FileVault enabled, have encrypted drives, and on those it is completely thorough. The reset destroys the encryption key, and no lab can restore anything those keys protected. The one soft spot is an older Intel-based Mac with a spinning hard drive and FileVault turned off, where a standard erase clears the catalogue but leaves data physically present on the drive for forensic software to recover. Selling such a Mac? Simply turn FileVault on and let it complete (or do the longer secure erase process instead of the quicker one) before selling.

The mirror question (can you get anything back after a reset?) has the same response from the other side: no. A modern Mac won't have a hidden partition where your files are held, there will be no bin that survived, and there's nothing left for a recovery bench to read. Anything that was not backed up before "Erase All Content" was run is gone as a matter of cryptography, not effort. That's why this guide follows the steps in the order it does. Step one is the only part of this process that cannot be redone.

When it stops being a reset question

A Mac that is accidentally wiped clean, or one that won't start up while the files are still wanted: that's a data recovery situation, and the odds split cleanly. If you have a machine that won't boot but has healthy storage, you should be able to recover your lost files fairly easily, and in many cases fully. On the other hand, if a modern Mac has genuinely been wiped, there is no recovering anything: the encryption that protects your files works both ways. In either case, stop using the computer immediately, because with each new write to the drive, your files may be written over.

The Apple bench work is outlined on the MacBook recovery and iMac recovery pages, while pricing is set out directly at what data recovery costs. One boundary is clearly stated again: this bench service is limited to removable Mac storage, meaning hard drives and blade SSDs from the pre-soldered generations, and does not include chips soldered to logic boards, which is what T2 and Apple Silicon computers carry. For those models, a good backup routine is not just advice, but the only protection available. Unsure which type of computer you have? The free diagnostic costs nothing and provides a direct answer.