Factory resetting a MacBook or iMac without losing your data

First get your files off, then sign out of Apple's locks

A factory reset means every file, photo, app and setting is wiped, so the first thing to do when performing one is to save everything you wish to keep. Copy your documents, photos and other files to an external drive, create a full Time Machine backup, or confirm that everything has genuinely finished syncing to iCloud (an upload that is still waiting to finish is not the same as it being completed). The storage on modern Macs is soldered to the logic board and encrypted, so you cannot easily undo a wipe once you perform it. Back up now while you can.

Then unlink the Mac from your Apple Account. Sign out of Find My Mac (in System Settings → your name → iCloud), sign out of iMessage within the Messages app, and deauthorise the computer in both the Music and TV apps so you don't use up one of your account's authorisations. When you sign out of Find My, Activation Lock is lifted, which prevents a future user from being stuck at a login screen they are unable to clear.

The one-click route: Erase All Content and Settings

If your Mac has Apple Silicon (any M-series MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, iMac, Mac mini or Mac Studio), or is an Intel Mac with the T2 security chip, and you're running macOS Monterey or newer, you'll have a built-in reset similar to the iPhone's. Go to System Settings → General → Transfer or Reset → Erase All Content and Settings (on macOS Monterey, you'll access it via the System Preferences menu). Enter your password, allow it to sign you out everywhere, and confirm.

It's fast and thorough because, rather than overwriting the disk, it discards the encryption keys. Since your data was already encrypted at rest, discarding those keys makes everything instantly unreadable. Afterwards, the Mac installs a clean copy of macOS and restarts straight to the "Hello" screen. This is how Apple recommends preparing a MacBook or iMac for sale or hand-on, and for most people it will be the only way they ever perform a reset.

The hands-on route: Recovery Mode and Disk Utility on older Intel Macs

Older Intel Macs without a T2 chip don't have an "Erase All Content" switch, so you'd erase them by hand from Recovery Mode. Shut down the Mac, then boot into Recovery Mode: on an Intel Mac, hold Command-R from power-on until you see the Apple logo; on an Apple Silicon Mac (should you take that route instead), hold the power button until "Loading startup options" appears, then select Options. Both land you in the macOS Utilities window.

Select Disk Utility, click on the internal disk (typically "Macintosh HD"), hit Erase and format it as APFS on any recent version of macOS. Close back out and select Reinstall macOS to place a fresh copy of the system onto the empty disk. A notable symptom here: a folder with a flashing question mark at boot simply indicates the Mac can't find a system to boot from. Recovery Mode is where you would erase and reinstall or, if the files still matter, stop and image the drive instead of wiping it.

Does a reset really wipe the data — and what it can't bring back

A factory reset and a secure erase are not automatically the same thing. On any Apple Silicon or T2 Mac (or any Mac with FileVault enabled) the data is encrypted, so discarding the key (which Erase All Content does) constitutes a true secure erase: the old contents can no longer be put together again. On an older Intel Mac with a plain hard drive and FileVault off, a standard Disk Utility erase mostly just clears the index, and determined forensic analysis could still recover remnants. Before passing that machine along, enable FileVault first or run a full erase rather than the quick one.

The flipside of that coin is equally important: since a proper reset is designed to render your previous data irretrievable, it will not preserve or 'restore' anything for you. There is no hidden copy and no bin that lives beyond it. Whatever you didn't back up prior to the wipe is, on a modern Mac, effectively gone, which is why this guide begins with backing up.

Wiped it already, or it won't boot? Now it's a recovery job

In case you've reached this point due to a previously performed reset (by you or another party), or because the Mac won't boot at all and you need the files rather than a clean installation, you've moved from "reset" to data recovery, and the two are handled in very different ways. A Mac that fails to boot yet whose storage remains physically sound is often highly recoverable; a drive that has actually been erased is a much tougher, sometimes impossible job, which is exactly why we keep emphasising: back up before resetting. Either way, avoid using the Mac further so nothing new overwrites what may remain.

We recover data from Apple machines all the time (see MacBook data recovery and iMac data recovery for how each is handled), and our price page (what data recovery actually costs) gives you honest pricing. The one hard fact to state bluntly: on Apple Silicon and T2 Macs the storage is soldered to the logic board and encrypted, so if that board fails without a backup even a lab may not be able to help. A backup made before anything goes wrong is by far the best insurance. Having problems now? Start the free online diagnostic and we'll tell you honestly what's possible.