Erasing Time Capsule - How Long?

[AppleUser2]

Does anybody know how long it takes to erase a 500G time capsule using secure erase 1 pass please? Mine has been going for 5 hours now and is not even half way. I am worried it is stuck. I had about 490G used.

Thanks

 

[geoffreak]

Why would you erase it? Time Machine automatically overwrites old backups to make room for new ones.

 

[GimmeSlack12]

You used zeroing out so you will have to wait, and wait, and wait, and wait, and... well I'm sure you get the point. Imagine if you used 7-pass!!!

 

[AppleUser2]

Thanks - I cancelled it after you pointed out that it overwrites itself. The disc is now showing as empty so it either just erased or did the whole process and the status bar just hung.

 

[AppleUser2]

You used zeroing out so you will have to wait, and wait, and wait, and wait, and... well I'm sure you get the point. Imagine if you used 7-pass!!!

Good point - that's why I opted for just the one pass but even that took some time!

 

[HLdan]

Thanks - I cancelled it after you pointed out that it overwrites itself. The disc is now showing as empty so it either just erased or did the whole process and the status bar just hung.

I don't think you understand what the Pass is for. It's not for emptying out the hard drive, it's for writing zeros over the data that could be recovered thus making it a clean drive for security reasons. Showing the drive is empty doesn't mean that it's been zeroed out from recoverable data.

 

[Unibody5]

Thanks - I cancelled it after you pointed out that it overwrites itself. The disc is now showing as empty so it either just erased or did the whole process and the status bar just hung.

It does a quick erase before zeroing so you can cancel it and still have an erased disk.

 

[AppleUser2]

I don't think you understand what the Pass is for. It's not for emptying out the hard drive, it's for writing zeros over the data that could be recovered thus making it a clean drive for security reasons. Showing the drive is empty doesn't mean that it's been zeroed out from recoverable data.

Thanks - I am loading the time capsule back up now (I just needed some old files gone securely from the time capsule) with about 200G of data (160 from one machine and 40G from another) so perhaps this overwrite is effectively helping by overlaying new data onto the disc and making the old data more unaccessible?
Sorry if I am not getting this but the above seems to make sense to me.

 

[HLdan]

Thanks - I am loading the time capsule back up now (I just needed some old files gone securely from the time capsule) with about 200G of data (160 from one machine and 40G from another) so perhaps this overwrite is effectively helping by overlaying new data onto the disc and making the old data more unaccessible?
Sorry if I am not getting this but the above seems to make sense to me.

No worries, you weren't doing anything wrong. A zero pass does take quite a while, sometimes it can be hours. 7 Pass takes all night. It's definitely worth the wait.