speeding up hard drive wipe

[Ken D'Ambrosio]

On 2020-09-26 09:11, Grizzly via ubuntu-users wrote:
> 26 September 2020  at 7:24, Ken D'Ambrosio wrote:
> Re: speeding up hard drive wipe (at least in part)
> 
>> On 2020-09-25 19:47, Noah wrote:
>>> Hi there,
>>> 
>>> I am using the wipe binary to erase a drive.  My hard dive is a 6TB
>>> SATA drive sitting in an USB drive box.
>>> 
>>> $ sudo wipe -q /dev/sdc
>>> Okay to WIPE 1 special file ? (Yes/No) yes
>>> 
>>> The UI is telling me that it will take over 10 weeks to complete one
>>> round of WIPE.
> 
> 
>> I've never seen or heard of anyone *actually* recovering data from a
>> drive wiped by a simple overwrite such as dd does.
> 
> I don't know about  Ubuntu wiped drives, (and don't know the best app 
> to
> recover data anyway) but I do a regular wipe of (free space) on my 
> windows
> drives (yes I know it "may" reduce disk life) and the other day I ran a
> recovery app to get a recently deleted txt file, app reads header so 
> txt
> includes most text content file types like:-
> 
> text files: txt, html, asp, bat, C, jsp, perl, php, py/emlx... scripts
> 
> (that is why I don't usually try for txt type) , long story short, I 
> forgot the
> app was running in the background, and left it for a few hours, it 
> didn't find
> the txt file I wanted, but it did recover a number (in the 1,000's) of 
> other
> files that I had not seen in years, so even after a good wipe it can 
> happen (at
> least on windows)

Files deleted are very different than files overwritten.  While I do 
agree that it's non-trivial to usefully find stuff from deleted files, 
it absolutely *can* be done -- the data still exists, but it's a pain to 
find it.  That's VERY different than the disk -- files, deleted files, 
blank space, the whole shebang -- being overwritten with random data.  
You will *not* be running a generic tool and finding stuff on that, and 
since that was the original ask, I feel it's important to draw a 
distinction.

-Ken