Factory resetting a MacBook or iMac — and keeping the files that matter

Job one is the backup; job two is signing out

A factory reset takes your Mac back to its out-of-the-box state and removes everything on it, with no soft version: every file, photo, app and setting goes. Therefore, the first action cannot be to do a factory reset. First comes saving everything you care about, either by copying it to an external hard drive, by completing a full Time Machine backup, or by making sure Apple's iCloud has genuinely completed the sync process (an endless "Uploading..." doesn't count as finished). Because modern Macs have their storage soldered onto their logic boards and encrypted, this means there will be no way to restore data if you wipe now and regret it later. Make backups while you can.

Then disconnect from your Apple identity. Inside System Settings (click on your name at the top), select "iCloud" and toggle Find My Mac to off. Sign out of iMessage from within the Messages app. Remove the authorisation for the computer from both the Music and TV apps, as you don't want to waste one of those authorisation slots. Turning off Find My will also release Activation Lock, and if you skip that step the next owner meets a sign-in wall they can't get past.

Route one: Erase All Content and Settings

On Apple Silicon Mac computers (every M-series MacBook Air and Pro, iMac, Mac mini and Mac Studio) and all Intel Macs with an embedded T2 chip that run macOS Monterey or later, the reset is one simple built-in switch; click to open System Settings → General → Transfer or Reset → Erase All Content and Settings (on Monterey itself it is found under the System Preferences menu). Enter your password, let it sign you out of all accounts and then confirm.

The speed is really what makes this process clever. Nothing has to be laboriously overwritten. Because the data on the disk was already encrypted at rest, all that needs to happen is that the encryption keys need to be destroyed by the Mac, and in doing so, all the previous bytes become permanently unreadable (and therefore "gibberish"). Then a new version of macOS can be written to the disk and the Mac will boot into the 'Hello' screen. This is the method Apple points both sellers and gift givers towards, and for nearly everyone it is most likely the only reset they would ever have to do.

Route two: Recovery Mode on older Intel Macs

Pre-T2 Intel Macs do not have this option; therefore, a wipe is done manually by going into Recovery Mode. Turn off your computer. Next, start it up while holding down Command-R, and release when the Apple logo shows on screen. (If you are an owner of one of the Apple Silicon computers and you wish to use Recovery for some other reason, just hold the power button until 'Loading startup options' displays on the screen. From there, select Options.) Regardless of how you get there, it will display the macOS Utilities window.

Beginning with that you would open Disk Utility, select your internal disk ('Macintosh HD' as a rule), and select Erase with APFS selected as the format for any recent macOS, exit Disk Utility and choose Reinstall macOS which will put a fresh version of the operating system on the now-empty internal disk. One symptom that usually leads someone to this page is a flashing question-mark folder at start up, indicating that the computer cannot find a bootable system. Recovery Mode is the right place to erase and reinstall your system; and if the files still matter, it's also the best point at which to stop and image your drive before wiping anything.

Is a reset a secure erase — and can anything come back?

You can't count on every single time you do a reset to give you a secure erase. If your data is encrypted (which is true for all Apple Silicon and T2 Macs as well as for all Macs running FileVault), then throwing away the key (which is exactly what "Erase All Content" does) will accomplish the real deal of securely erasing the old contents; no one has any way of reconstructing it. However, if you have an older Intel Mac on a plain hard drive with FileVault off, a standard Disk Utility "erase" will only perform an index wipe, so determined forensic investigators may still recover fragments. Want to pass this computer along? Turn FileVault on first, or go ahead and do the full erase instead of the quick version.

And the mirror image of that point matters equally: an appropriate reset is engineered so you cannot get your previous data back, which means it preserves nothing and restores nothing. There are no hidden partitions, there are no surviving binned items. Whatever was not backed up on a modern Mac prior to wiping is gone, which is the whole reason this guide put the backup at the top.

Reset already done, or Mac won't boot? That's a different job

If you are reading this as your Mac has already been reset (either by yourself or a previous owner), or if the Mac will not start and you want to access the data stored within it rather than a clean installation of an OS, at that point, the question regarding resetting the Mac is no longer valid; it is now about data recovery. This makes a difference in what can be done for the Mac. A non-booting Mac with healthy storage is frequently highly recoverable, whereas a disk that has had all data wiped from it (in other words, a drive that has genuinely been "erased") is difficult and often impossible to recover from, and that is exactly why this guide keeps mentioning backup. Either way, stop using the Mac as soon as possible, as new write operations to the media can bury anything that still exists.

Information about our services for Apple products is on MacBook data recovery and iMac data recovery. Additionally, what data recovery actually costs explains the pricing clearly. One clear limit is that we recover from Mac hard drives and blade SSDs that can be removed from the machine; storage that has been soldered to the logic board (T2 and Apple Silicon Macs) is outside what we take on, so the backup you keep before an issue is really the only type of "insurance" for these computers. Having an issue now? The free online diagnostic will provide you with a straightforward answer as to what's possible.