I have been asked for advice regarding the decommissioning and disposal of a Mac which is old (approx. 8 years) and slow.
There is a USB socket and it is planned to save copies of some photos.
I really feel out of my depths here, having had no experience of Macs at all. Are photo files likely to be the same as on a PC?
Would destruction of the hard drive be advisable, as I have done on old PCs?
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The photos will more than likely be standard JPEG images which will work fine on the PC. And yes either keep the hard drive in a safe place or destroy it.
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>> I really feel out of my depths here, having had no experience of Macs at all. Are photo files
>> likely to be the same as on a PC?
Yes they are almost certainly going to be JPEG files.
If you plug in an external USB storage device (hard drive or flash drive) then this should be automatically mounted by the Mac. It will then display the drive on the desktop and opening the folder/icon will open it up to let you copy files onto it. The drive should be formatted as FAT32 if you want to access the files on both the Mac and a PC - by default a Mac will only read NTFS drives.
Each user on the Mac will (by default) have their own home folder. Under this there will be a folder for Documents, Music, Pictures, Movies, Downloads, etc. So it should be fairly easy to drag and drop these.
If you feel there is important info on the drive then by all means destroy it. But depending on which Mac this is, getting it out might be tricky. What model is it BTW - someone might want it even if for a nominal fee. It will probably run Linux quite well.
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"Would destruction of the hard drive be advisable, as I have done on old PCs?"
I suppose that's the ultimate method but I would be happy with the 35 pass erase that you should already have on your machine in Disc Utilities, assuming you are running Tiger or Leopard.
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Mac decommissioning - RattleandSmoke
