I have erased some sensitive business files from an external drive. I want to make sure they are never recoverable. Is there a way to scrub. the empty space on a drive without doing a reformat of the drive?
MacBook Air 13″, macOS 13.2
There is a way to Password Protect the External Drive but does require Reformatting the drive
An Apple link specific to this process is below
Encrypt and protect a storage device with a password in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support (CA)
There are some apps which can overwrite the vacant or unused portions of a disk. To be clear, when a file or app is deleted, the file is not actually deleted. Its identifier is removed. The file/app remains on the disk until something overwrites that space. The apps which do overwriting simply overwrite with zeros and ones. They can be made to make a number of passes to securely do the overwriting. If you do an internet search you can likely find one that suits your needs.
Is the external drive an SSD or rotational drive? If it's an SSD there's no multiple overwriting necessary as there is on a rotational drive.
To avoid this problem in the future, encrypt all drives before use. Then all you need to do is delete the file.
For internal and boot drives, you might also need to worry about local snapshots.
Securely clean space on hard drives
