I’m looking for an app for my M1 Macbook that can shred external drives, both SSD and HDD. I see there are a few different options, one of the most interesting ones is VaultSort. They have a free version but you have to purchase the premium version for the disk shred features. Has anyone tried it? Is it worth it? Or should I try something else? I’m not able to find any reviews of it.
You can wipe external drives for free using diskutil zerodisk in the Terminal. See here for the instructions (and be very careful).
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I don’t want to mess around with the command line, so I went ahead and purchased VaultSort to give it a try. I was a bit skeptical about this app because it is only $15 and couldn’t find any 3rd party reviews of it. But I have to say, I am pleasantly surprised. It does a good job wiping my disks. It has some other handy features as well.
How do you check that?
I used DiskDrill on the disk afterwards to see if any of the data could be recovered. It was wiped clean by VaultSort.
Technically, if you decided to encrypt external drives when formatting them, a simple format (which would be much quicker than using any tool to overwrite the contents) would also make everything unrecoverable as encryption keys are lost at that point (and files were unreadable without a password previously anyway).
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