There are many reasons to reset your Mac to factory settings. You may be ready to sell your Mac or it may just be slow due to many years of use. If you find yourself needing to erase the contents of your hard drive and start fresh you can do so in just a few quick steps.
When you reset your Mac to factory settings you are essentially performing a series of low-level operations behind the scenes. The main two things that occur are a full hard drive format and a reinstallation of macOS / Mac OS X.
A format of the hard drive will erase all data on the hard drive and remove it from your iMac, MacBook Pro or Mac Mini. While it is often considered to be a permanent deletion of data this is not always the case, Disk Drill is capable of recovering data after a factory reset. It is even possible to recover full partitions with Disk Drill if your Mac was repartitioned after a factory reset.
There are quite a few common reasons to restore your Mac to factory settings, the most common is due to issues with the file system. These issues can present themselves as lost or damaged files, slowness/sluggishness or random errors.
If you are resetting your computer due to any of the aforementioned we highly suggest using a data recovery software to attempt to recover any important data that you may already be missing before proceeding. Data recovery becomes more complicated as time progresses and after factory resets and formatting. Running a scan with Disk Drill before performing a factory restore could help you to locate and recover valuable files which may otherwise be lost.
There are additional benefits to running Disk Drill before performing a factory reset, such as our Recovery Vault technology. Utilizing Recovery Vault increases your chances of recovering important data which will be erased during a factory reset.
Mac’s primary file system (HFS/HFS+) does not store valuable information about files on the drive such as their location and filename when the file system gets damaged. This means that recovering lost or deleted data is much more complicated on these types of drives. Disk Drill’s Recovery Vault technology keeps a copy of this information and makes it much easier, faster and more probable to recover lost or deleted files on your Mac OS X computer, even after performing a factory reset.
There are a few handy steps you should take before you proceed to reset your Mac to factory settings. These instructions will work on all computers running Mac OS (X) such as Mac Mini, Macbook, etc. Please see our handy tips below:
You or someone else may have accidentally reset your Mac to factory settings or you may not have been aware of what a factory reset really does before performing one. Important files and folders will be deleted from your computer after a factory reset.
Disk Drill utilizes powerful scanning technology to recover remnants of files from your drive. The faster Disk Drill is run after a factory reset the better the chances are for optimal file recovery.
You can run a scan to detect which files can be recovered at no charge with Disk Drill Basic Edition. To get started:
Deep Scan is particularly useful for complicated file recovery situations such as when the files are on an HFS/HFS+ disk and Recovery Vault has not been used. This is also the best way to find files that have been lost or deleted for long periods of times. Deep Scan will rebuild the files based on information it finds on the disk and functions even when metadata or a backup copy of the file cannot be found, this is especially useful after a Mac OS factory reset has been performed.
The lost partition search is used to find partitions which have been deleted or removed after reformatting (restoring your computer) to factory settings. Not only is it possible to recover files from lost partitions but it is possible to recover the full partition with Disk Drill’s powerful HFS+ healing algorithms. You can run a lost partition search to scan your disk for partitions which have been removed and may still be recoverable.
Disk Drill can still recover files even if your Mac was repartitioned after a factory reset. Disk Drill utilizes a special HFS+ healing algorithms capable of scanning multiple parts of the disk to find metadata and other remnants of data which enable successful file and partition recovery.
The original HFS+ partition can often be recovered by Disk Drill, no additional steps or software is required. Disk Drill has this feature built into its powerful recovery technology and will automatically scan and select the appropriate recovery method to detect and recover your original partitions.
The Basic edition of Disk Drill allows you to preview and verify which data can be recovered at no charge. You can run a scan at no charge to detect which files can be found by our powerful software before upgrading to the Pro edition for unlimited file recovery. Disk Drill features an intuitive preview option which allows you to preview found files and verify their contents. Hundreds of file types are supported by Disk Drill including popular types of files such as music, videos, word documents, emails (stored locally) and ZIP archives.
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