speeding up hard drive wipe

[Grizzly]

26 September 2020  at 15:11, Chris Green wrote:
Re: speeding up hard drive wipe (at least in part)

>On Sat, Sep 26, 2020 at 02:11:15PM +0100, 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)
>> 
>Yes, but do any of those files contain anything useful to anyone?

A couple did, given there were 1000's I had to write a small batch to grep thru 
them, a lot were old xml files, of no use really