Looking to do a nice thing, or mitvah, and donate your Mac? You may be also looking to give it to a friend or family member after receiving a new Mac yourself. There are a few steps you should take prior to ensure your files are safe and your Mac is totally ready.
Here’s how to prepare your Mac before donating it:
- Back up all your files. You can use Time Machine for this by restoring one of your backups, starting a new backup, or just copying your files to an external hard drive or online cloud account.
- Disable any online accounts. This may apple to playing iTunes music on different computers. Make sure there is no tie to this that may turn up later on.
- Extras? Did you install any additional RAM, hard drives, or peripherals. Take them with you if these extra boosts will be appreciated by you more.
- Wipe out your Mac. You’ll want to format your Mac to ensure your files don’t turn up later on. The best way to do that is to restore your Mac to the original operating system software is to put the disk that came with your Mac, reboot it and press C key at same time. Then, install the operating system into a new Mac OS Extended (Journaled) partition. If you didn’t receive an operating system DVD, use the Internet recovery by rebooting and pressing Option-Command-R keys at the same time.
Now your Mac is properly ready to be donated and you didn’t need to be a Mac expert or Apple store genius to do it.
