Does Erase permanently erase?

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I am going to use the Mac OSX Lion Disk Utility Erase tool because I am going to return a hard drive I already backed up on. I am concerned that the deleted items can be retrieved by some high end technology. Is the Erase tool on my Mac the kind of erase that permanently shreds all of my files or is it alway possible to retrieve them with the right tool?
 
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Way... way too many specs to list.
Raise the security level on erase, the DOD standard would be best, but it WILL take a long time.
 
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Raise the security level on erase, the DOD standard would be best, but it WILL take a long time.

I am using DOD and it states it will take 2 Days and 15 hours!! lol So is it safe to have my energy saver on normal during that time?
 
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I am using DOD and it states it will take 2 Days and 15 hours!! lol So is it safe to have my energy saver on normal during that time?

Should be, and just note that not even the department of defense will be able to retrieve anything off of that hard drive after you're done! ;)
 
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I know a guy...

But I don't want to have to kill anybody. ;)
 
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Okay I was running DOD and it stated I had 2 days 16 hours to delete everything. I had around gigs of back up material to delete. It's been doing that all day. Now all of a sudden it's all deleted? I thought it was going to take 2 days! I got this completed message when I plugged in my new firewire peripheral. You don't think the plug in did anything do you? lol There was nothing on the hard drive. So I initialized it again like it asked and there was nothing on it. I am doing a DOD erase again just to make sure. How can I make sure this complete erase worked correctly? Whey did it all of a sudden complete the delete when it states it would take 2 days?
 
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Don't delete so much at once.
Those time estimates are rarely accurate in my experience.
 
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Don't delete so much at once.
Those time estimates are rarely accurate in my experience.

Same. Says it'll take 2 days at first, can wind up taking less than 8 hours...
 

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