How to format your Mac without erasing the hard drive

A few days ago a user asked how to recover deleted data after deleting the Administrator account from the Mac and the answer to that question is Time Machine and backups. In any other case and without having saved a backup copy, it is impossible to recover the information when deleting the Administrator account.

This option is used in "format mode" without actually going through the steps of removing and reinstalling the operating system. Personally speaking I will always say that it is better to carry out a clean installation of the system to leave the Mac ready, but if you don't want to carry out this installation you can carry out the removal process from the Administrator. Today we will see how to carry out this process of deleting the Administrator user. Being clear about the possible loss of data if we do not have a backup, everyone is free to use this method or not.

First step

The first is carry out our backup to safeguard your important data. Another detail to take into account in this process is that all the documents and files that we have out of the folder of our Administrator user (Home) they will not be removed in the process.

Now let's go through System Preferences> Users and Groups and unlock the padlock with the Administrator password to start the process. Now, once this previous step is done, we are going to create a new Administrator account by pressing the symbol "+" and we give you the privileges.

System reboot

The next step is perform a Mac restart and log in with the new administrator account that we have previously created. With this, what we are going to achieve is to have the two administrator accounts ready and not leave the Mac at any time without an Administrator.

Once restarted we return to System Preferences> Users and Groups and we select the padlock to open it. Remember that this time the password is the one used for the new Administrator user. 

Delete the account by deleting data

Once we have gotten here by carrying out each of the previous steps, what we have to do is simply remove old admin and for this we place ourselves on top of it and we select the symbol «-« from the bottom.

On this occasion I have not reached the point of eliminating the Administrator user, but in the earlier versions of OS X a menu appeared similar to this one in the image below in which it allowed us to carry out several actions: save a backup copy of the deleted account in a folder, delete the Administrator account without deleting the Home folder and the third, which was to delete all the content from account.

In OS X El Capitan it does not seem that this menu appears as available (if someone tries it and confirms that it leaves sending photos) according to the user who told us he deleted his Administrator account, Alan, so watch out since once eliminated there is no going back.

And that's it!