If your Mac is older then the steps you need to take are a little more complicated, we’ll run though the steps for older Macs below. It also needs to be running either macOS Monterey or macOS Ventura. However you will need to have a M1-series Mac, M2-series Mac, or a Mac with a T2 chip inside. Thanks to this new “Erase All Content and Settings” option, wiping your Mac so that you can pass it on, sell it, or just because you want to do a clean install in the hope that it will fix issues is quite a simple process.

When macOS Monterey was introduced in 2021 Apple added a new option in System Preferences (System Settings as of macOS Ventura) for wiping a Mac and returning it to factory settings. We have a complete guide that explains how to back up a Mac as well as this guide to the best Mac Backup Software. This cloned drive can be re-cloned back to the main drive if you decide to restore your Mac, or it can be used to access all the original files and transfer them and all your settings to your new computer. If you don’t want to use Apple’s free Time Machine software, or you can make a clone of the whole hard drive using a program like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper (both are available as free trials). The best thing about backing up with Time Machine is it makes it really easy to move your data to a new Mac afterwards. This can be done very simply using Apple’s Time Machine software – here’s how to back up using Time Machine.

Luckily backing up your Mac is easy to do – as long as you have a external hard drive to use. In these days of working predominantly in the cloud it is an easy mistake to make! Unfortunately you can’t back up everything on your Mac to iCloud.

This is because – as you would expect – resetting a Mac to factory settings gets rid of all the data stored on that machine.ĭon’t fall in to the trap we fell into: Because we use iCloud to sync all files across all our Apple devices we assumed that we could just recover everything we needed from the cloud – which was true to a certain extent, but it wasn’t until after we wiped the Mac that we realised that the data for one non-Apple app we used wasn’t in the cloud. Before you do anything you should back up or clone your Mac.

Wiping macbook air clean