Zeroing out in Safari

I have a tidy mind and the thought of all of those bits of forgotten items floating around on my HD annoys me. But, as you will know, Mac no longer supports ' zero out freespace' in Utilities. I have found a terminal instruction but it is for SSD whereas my Mac uses HDD

I have got so far "diskutil secure/Erase freespace 3 /Volumes...... but anything I put after that gets rejected. So can anyone fill in the bit after volumes ? Thanks

Essentially, you have two choices to do what you want:

1. Use defragmentation software (iDefrag, etc.) Not free, however.

2. Make a Time Machine or Clone backup, erase the hard drive, reinstall, restore from backup.

You're done.

(BTW, never use defrag software on a SSD)

I have a tidy mind and the thought of all of those bits of forgotten items floating around on my HD annoys me.

Click to expand...

How about learning how to live and just cope with your "annoyances". ;D

The only reason one might want to remove "all of those bits of forgotten items" is to basically just overwrite the free space on a drive to prevent file recovery. There's no other actual benefit.

Otherwise, do as chscag suggests but defragging may not even leave clear free space behind, but the #2 suggestion is excellent and and wii do that and I would suggest using CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner):
https://bombich.com/

Then you'll end up with a bootable clone backup as well. A double Plus.





- Patrick
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