Time Required for Secure Erase Option

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Level 1

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Time Required for Secure Erase Option

I purchased a Lacie 2TB external drive today at the Apple store.

The Time Machine backup just sat on "preparing backup". Long story short I contacted Apple Support and the drive appeared bad. Sometimes Finder would see it readily and sometimes not.

I connected the new drive today and ran through the setup and format. Time Machine still took awhile to prepare the backup but it did finally start. The estimated time was 8 hours. Fine. I just left it and worked on other stuff.

Later in the day I came back and the backup had failed. 😐

The error message was something like this could be a temporary problem, try again. I did, it failed again. When you click on the small round circle the recommended step is go to Disk Utility and run First Aid. Sounded reasonable so I did. The new drive checked fine. Ran First Aid on the MacBook Air and it was good too. 😕

Called support again and checked a few things on the drive and laptop. We decided to erase the drive as it was new and nothing was any use anyway. There was about 22GB of a 215GB estimated backup.

I was looking at the options for erase which go from Fastest to Most Secure. My support person was not familiar with how long these options took. I meant to move the option back to Fastest but must have selected the 2nd option. We scheduled a callback an hour later. The progress bar has barely moved!!!

My question is how long, approximately, does this secure erase take? The Apple site says one option writes over erased data 3 times to meet a specification and 7 times to meet another. Ok. So if I have 22GB on a new disk does it see that as erased data? The progress bar below the "Starting secure erase..." is 2" plus 13/16ths" long. The bar has moved about 3/16ths inches in 2 hours!!! There appears to be no way of cancelling either!!!

MacBook Air, macOS High Sierra (10.13.3)

Posted on May 7, 2018 6:55 PM

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Answer 1

Eau Rouge

Level 8

42,656 points

May 8, 2018 12:32 AM in response to JMac4403

As you are only using the HD for your own use you do not need to run 3 pass erase or 7 pass erase etc, these can take absolute ages depending on the amount of data there is to be erased. Connect the drive to your Mac, open Disk Utility.

Click View in the menubar, make sure Select All Devices is selected. In the sidebar of Disk Utility select the Disk that you want to Erase (not the Volume). Click Erase, give the Disk a name, select Mac OS Extended (Journaled) for Format and GUID Partition Map for Scheme, ignore the security options and press the Erase button. This should take only a few seconds. As it is a Lacie disk it may well have come with Lacies own software, do not install this, Macs don't need to have the disk manufacturers software installed, it will probably function more efficiently without it.

Back to System Preferences> Time Machine, select the disk, uncheck Backup Automatically, check Show Time Machine in the menu bar, click on Options. Now as an experiment we will not do a full back up, so we are going to add items to exclude them from the first back up. Click on the + button and add items that you don't want to back up.

So for example if in this instance we only want to back up the contents of your System folder try this. In the column you should see Applications, Library, System and Users, we just want to select Applications, Library and Users, so press and hold the Command key and click on those three folders, Press the Exclude button. These should now display in the Exclude these items from backups dialogue, after a bit of time you should see how much space the back up will take.

Click Save. Exit System Preferences go to the menubar and click on the Time Machine icon and click Back Up Now.

You can check the progress of the backup by clicking on the Time Machine icon in the menubar, or by opening System Preferences> Time Machine. Once you have created this first experimental back up then you can go back to Time Machine Preferences and remove what is being excluded from backups.

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Time Required for Secure Erase Option

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