For most home users, DBAN is still a low risk, simple and effective tool to securely erase data on a hard drive. While it doesn’t erase hidden areas and bad sectors, the risks of personal data leakage there are relatively low – and powerful forensic techniques may be required to recover any such data.

How To Use DBAN

1. Back up your data. I have to say it.
2. Download DBAN. Download DBAN from the official site.
3. Burn DBAN to a CD.
4. Remove all the devices you don’t want to erase.
5. Boot from the CD.
6. Start DBAN in Interactive Mode.
7. Select the drive for erasure.
8. Start the wipe process.

Typically, it takes roughly 1-3 hours for DBAN to wipe a 1TB hard drive. However, if your computer is really old and its processor is slow, it might take longer than this.

Darik’s Boot And Nuke (DBAN) is an entirely free data destruction program used to completely erase all the files on a hard drive. DBAN has to run while the operating system isn’t in use so you’ll need to burn the program to a disc (CD, DVD, USB) and run it from there.

Create a bootable USB flash drive from the DBAN ISO

1. Click DBAN ISO for creating a bootable CD-R and choose Save.
2. Run the Rufus application (double-click).
3. Rufus will find the USB flash drive.
4. When the pop-up menu appears, choose the dban iso option.
5. Click Open.
6. Click START.

In reality, the formatting time may be slightly different from the used space on your hard drive. How Long Does It Take to Format a 500GB Hard Drive: According to a test, we find that a 500GB hard drive takes about 8 minutes to format when selecting Quick Format, while it takes about 25 minutes under the Full Format.

In cases where a drive with a capacity of a terabyte will be wiped using the DoD-approved nine passes of randomly written ones and zeros, it is very likely that this process will take in excess of one month of 24 hours per day processing to finish this wiping procedure.

Since you are wiping the disk, there isn’t a really bad way to stop it. Just wipe it again and all is clean… I wish there was a simple ESC key to stop it but alas.. you get the RESET button or the POWER button…

In September 2012, Blancco of Finland announced its acquisition of DBAN. The most recent version of DBAN is 2.3. 0, which was released on 4 June 2015. Since that time, DBAN development has ended and the DBAN official website is now used by Blancco to market their Blancco Drive Eraser instead.

Stopping a wipe before it’s done will not harm your drive. When you install Windows it has a reformatting feature as part of the install. There is absolutely zero risk in stopping a wipe before it is finished.